Most of the talk around Rosemead is going to focus on Lucy Liu, which is justified, because she's fantastic here, and I wouldn’t have blinked if she’d gotten an Oscar nomination for the performance.
The movie is supposedly based on a real story, and it's a deeply sad one. Liu plays Irene, who's an immigrant from Taiwan living in the title city in Los Angeles County with her 17-year-old son, Joe. Her husband, Joe's father, died not long ago, and that's compounded the huge problems already presented by Irene's cancer and Joe's schizophrenia.
As the film goes on, Joe's mental health difficulties get more intense and Irene begins to worry that he's going to do something violent as she discovers he's been spending a lot of time reading about school shootings and looking at guns on the internet. And I worried that the movie might be perpetuating an assumption that people with schizophrenia are prone to acts of violence. But, fortunately, if anything that happens here can be called fortunate, there's never any true indication that Joe intends anyone any harm.
Still, where it all ends up is incredibly painful, and we understand the context surrounding it all far better than if we were to read a news story about what eventually happens. Liu shows us all of the confusion and turmoil Irene is experiencing, and she does it with an expertly physical performance, altering the way she walks and making her face fall progressively farther and farther as the film goes on. Much of how Irene handles everything is informed by her cultural context, and seeing this helps us understand her actions, to the extent that we can. Joe's condition is presented through fragments of images and sounds, and we can understand there, too, what motivates him to do the things he does. If movies are meant to help us have empathy, Rosemead gets us a lot closer to an unimaginable situation than we might have thought we could ever be.
Rosemead is on VOD.
