Lucy Liu stuns in the uneven drama ‘Rosemead’

Lucy Liu delivers a towering performance in Rosemead, a strange and often uneven drama based on real events. Premiering at the Tribeca Festival, Eric Lin’s directorial debut is, for the most part, a straightforward study of the way Asian American communities can be harmfully closed off about mental health, which yields an intriguing and occasionally intense mother-son dynamic. However, the story’s conclusions are built on a flimsy foundation, despite technically matching how things really played out. Knowing the true story beforehand yields a curious, malformed sense of inevitability, while going into Rosemead none the wiser results in an off-kilter climax that doesn’t match the rest of the movie.

If its story were invented wholesale, it would feel like Rosemead has the wrong ending. And yet, given its basis in reality, it’s the only ending it could possibly have. Does this make its beginning and middle “incorrect”? There seems to be no way out of this conundrum for Lin, a first-time filmmaker searching for his cinematic voice in the precarious American indie space, where truly confrontational material is hard to come by. A huge part of this artistic paradox stems from Lin’s ability to paint empathetic character portraits—which unfortunately comes at the cost of presenting a story like Rosemead with the sharpened edges and hardened ugliness it deserves. Based on a 2017 L.A. Times article by Frank Shyong, it follows ailing middle-aged mother Irene (Liu), a widowed Taiwanese immigrant who runs a print shop, and cares for her schizophrenic, high school-aged son Joe (Lawrence Shou) as best as she knows how.

As presented by Lin, the smalltown Taiwanese community in Rosemead, California is rife with gossip and judgement. Although Irene seeks out help for Joe, this comes in the form of an ill-equipped community center hidden away in a shopping mall, and Irene herself is reluctant to sit in on her son’s sessions, despite being invited to do so. Out of sight, out of mind. When Joe can no longer hold on to happy memories to cope, his hallucinations worsen, and he begins fixating on various famous mass shooters. Irene is backed into a corner, but overcoming the distance between herself and her son would also involve being honest about her own illness, which she makes every effort to hide.

The crux of the film is the fraught dynamic between Irene and Joe, with fissures that gradually deepen, despite both mother and son’s sincere efforts. The problem, however, is that their interrelated issues—the way Irene’s secrecy impacts Joe, whose condition in turn weighs on Irene—are largely presented along separate tracks. That they’re cordoned off from one another is key to their relationship, but that the movie’s top-down view takes a similar approach (rather than tracing the micro-effects of each one’s illness on the other) yields an oddly distant and bifurcated plot, which practically plays out in the form of two separate movies.

Lin’s empathetic lens is, in this way, perhaps too empathetic: Rosemead is often unable to distance itself from its characters’ perspectives enough to trace the actual drama between them. His approach to Joe is often visually intriguing, resulting in a tender approach to auditory hallucinations by way of placing the viewer in his shoes, until we hear whispers and see the world through soft focus and disorienting angles, leaving us unmoored (Shou is also adept at digging in to Joe’s increasing anguish). The other half of this equation—the tale of Irene—is more stylistically plain, but Lin knows just when to get out of the way and let Liu’s performance take center stage. Her withheld body language, her broken English sprinkled across polite Mandarin, and the way she shuffles through scenes with a haggard poise, all speak to a woman barely holding things together as various walls close in. It’s a remarkable, vulnerable performance—the kind Liu has seldom been afforded throughout her Hollywood career—but it exists on the other side of a wall Lin constructs between his two protagonists. Audiences will end up caring for and understanding everything Irene does, but only up to a point.

Even when Irene and Joe’s paths become further entwined, the focus is rarely on both of them at once. There’s an immiscibility to the movie’s parallel unveilings, to the point that each stylistic approach starts to feel comfortable, and familiar, as the film goes on. So, when things finally come to a head, the dramatic turns Rosemead eventually takes feel almost entirely divorced from preceding scenes. Its final act both draws out its deeply macabre climax, while also making you wonder if you might have missed something along the way—some vital emotional information that might help reconcile the characters’ enormous dramatic leaps. 

The bitter directions of the real story feel not only unearned in this semi-fictional telling, but entirely out of the blue, further calling into question the very nature of Liu’s performance. Irene is a fictionalization of a real person, but when the full scope of the story fades into view, it’s hard not to wonder if Liu had been directed to play a more caring, more sympathetic character who didn’t really exist, owing to how the movie’s most desperate decisions unfold off-screen. It’s as though they stem from some mysterious, unseen narrative force that points all dramatic arrows towards a single conclusion, with no other possibilities. In attempting to dramatize the constricting taboos faced by Asian immigrant communities—on the subjects of mental and physical health—Rosemead presents a more cynical and inhumane worldview than was perhaps intended, as its ugliest developments feel practically fated, rather than being outcomes of human intent.