Plot: Inspired by a harrowing true story, Lucy Liu transforms in a riveting, career-redefining performance as an ailing woman who takes drastic measures to protect her troubled teenage son (Lawrence Shou). As his dark obsessions grow and time runs out, she is forced to make impossible choices: how far will she go and what is she willing to sacrifice? Set against the simmering tensions of a Chinese American community, Rosemead is a gripping portrait of a family pushed to the edge.
Review: Representation of Asian Americans has improved significantly over the last decade. From the Oscar triumph of Everything Everywhere All at Once to the critical acclaim of the Netflix series Beef, stories focused on Asian culture and its connection to the American experience have shifted from being on the fringes of cinema to vital stories at its core. With numerous small-screen series, such as Interior Chinatown and American Born Chinese, and films like Pixar’s Turning Red, showcasing the comedic side, and movies like Didi delving into more serious aspects, it should come as no surprise when a new film joins their ranks. Eric Lin’s Rosemead is an intense look at a family dealing with medical and psychological trauma within a larger view of the increasing prevalence of gun violence in the United States. Produced by and starring Lucy Liu in a performance that may be the best of her career, Rosemead is not only a good movie but an important one.
Rosemead follows Irene (Lucy Liu), the owner of a print shop in the Los Angeles area, who has terminal cancer. As she keeps her prognosis a secret from her teenage son, Joe (Lawrence Shou), Irene also contends with the loss of her husband to a sudden heart attack. Irene also tries to care for Joe as he struggles with a schizophrenia diagnosis that she is ashamed to face head-on. The stigma of being mentally ill is a damning one in Asian communities, something more pronounced as Irene was born in China, making Joe a first-generation American. While Joe is medicated and undergoing therapy with Dr. Hsu (James Chen), his behavior begins to become more erratic and shows signs of bordering on potential violence. Joe’s fixation on the rash of school shootings on the news gives Irene concerns that force her out of hiding from the truth of what may be happening to her son and sets her on a path to try to protect him from himself before she loses her fight with her cancer.
With a very low budget, Lucy Liu has been working to get Rosemead to screens for half a decade, feeling that the subject matter was important enough to devote her time to making it right. Liu adopts an accent and performs a significant portion of the film in Mandarin, accompanied by a physical transformation that conveys the physical toll of a life of labor and the frailty of cancer treatments. Yet, the intensity of her acting skill remains at the forefront. Liu has been in countless physically demanding roles in her career, most of which are built around action set-pieces, but she gets to stretch her dramatic talents here, and it is impressive to behold. Some may see similarities between Liu’s performance and Michelle Yeoh’s Academy Award-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but that is more superficial than anything. While both characters are Chinese mothers who struggle to reconcile their cultural identities with their first-generation American children, Lucy Liu’s performance is far darker and rooted in the psychological trauma of being a parent of a mentally unstable teenager. The choices Liu makes as an actor to tell this heart-rending, accurate tale are subtle and evoke emotions we have all felt ourselves.
As impressive as Lucy Liu is, newcomer Lawrence Shou delivers a moving debut performance as Joe. Actors who portray characters dealing with mental and psychological diagnoses often overlook the subtle elements of what those afflicted experience every day and tend to go with broader choices in showing these symptoms on screen. Shou has some loud and intense moments centered on Joe’s disconnection from reality, but he and Lucy Liu find a connection that echoes the bond between mother and child. The supporting cast includes Orion Lee, Jennifer Lim, Madison Hu, and James Chen, but the pairing of Liu and Shou is central to virtually the entire length of the film. While most of the actors in the cast interact, at one point or another, with Liu or Shou, their presence is intended to augment the central narrative; therefore, no one receives much development beyond serving to move the narrative forward. In some films, this would be a detractor, but Rosemead benefits from keeping the characters of Irene and Joe in focus throughout the film.
Written by Marilyn Fu (the upcoming The Copenhagen Test). Rosemead is the feature directorial debut of Eric Lin. Lin has worked extensively as a cinematographer and helmed several shorts before working with Luc Liu on this project. Bridging an indie sensibility with the eye of a director of photography, Lin allows the actors to take precedence in the frame and refrains from trying to do anything flashy. There is a workmanlike approach to how Lin filmed Rosemead that lends the story an immediacy and tension, driving the devastating subject matter home. The idea of school shootings has become so prevalent in American culture that we sometimes lose sight of how terrible they are, even before they happen. Rosemead never preaches to the audience about the dangers of firearms or the cause of violence using guns. Still, the threat that it could happen adds to the already grotesque nature they bring to our culture. The clash of American culture with Asian identity meets in Rosemead in ways you would not expect but which absolutely land their message.
Rosemead is an excellent showcase for the acting talents of Lucy Liu and a showcase for the skills of Lawrence Shou. If this were not a true story, I would have felt the direction the plot takes a little heavy-handed, but that does not detract from the horror of what these people went through. Rosemead is a small film, but it carries a big message, one that transcends ethnicity and cultural identity. This is a story about the importance of eradicating the stigmas of mental illness and embracing the challenge of caring for those who cannot do it for themselves. Lucy Liu has given a career-defining performance that deserves recognition. Rosemead may not end up at the Academy Awards, but it definitely deserves a spot amongst the most impactful and shocking films of the year.
Rosemead opens in a limited theatrical release on December 5th.
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Source:
JoBlo.com
