Rosemead – Review: Lucy Liu Shines As Her Character Suffers

Mental health is infrequently prioritized, much less talked about openly, in too many communities across the globe. Eric Lin’s Rosemead explores this issue vividly through the story of an ailing Chinese-American mother trying to help her son navigate the trials of high school after he’s diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

Based on a true story, the film paints a sorrowful but mesmerizing portrait of the mother and son’s relationship — complicated by medical issues and cultural traditions, but also by their mutual efforts to shield each other from, and perhaps deny to themselves, what each is going through. While Lin’s dedication to portraying the real events as they happen occasionally becomes a narrative liability, Lucy Liu’s devastating performance as a fiercely dedicated yet desperate parent helps elevate what’s an undeniable tragedy into a story about a mother’s ultimate — if misguided — expression of love.

Liu plays Irene Chao, the cancer-stricken owner of a copy-and-print shop in Rosemead, California. Although she’s quietly receiving experimental treatment to fight back the disease that took her husband a few years earlier, the prospects of a full recovery are slim. What concerns her more is the care of her son, Joe (newcomer Lawrence Shou), who meets regularly with a counselor to mitigate the symptoms of his mental illness.

In a Chinese-American community where such issues are seldom, if ever, shared outside the household, Irene maintains strict privacy about both of their diagnoses, even keeping Joe’s Asian-American doctor (James Chen) at arm’s length. But when a series of incidents at Joe’s school put him in the administration’s crosshairs, Irene closes ranks even more tightly, as she becomes ever more worried about his growing obsession with school shooters.

Beleaguered by violent imagery on the news, and eventually, in his head, Joe retreats into the handful of happy memories he has about his family while his father was still alive, many revolving around a cozy night they celebrated in a local hotel. In the meantime, Irene learns that, even if she survives cancer treatment, she’ll lose parental control of Joe after he turns 18. Feeling she has no one to turn to, Irene wrestles with how to tell Joe about her condition, much less to hand off his care. She’s soon faced with a terrible choice whose outcome — no matter what she decides — promises to permanently affect not only their relationship, but their community as a whole.

Frank Shyong first chronicled the events of “Irene” and her son in a 2017 article for the Los Angeles Times, and it’s been almost that long since Liu first became determined to adapt it into a film. That commitment oozes from every moment of her performance: The scene-stealing actress suppresses her natural charisma to portray a woman for whom unwanted attention from outsiders seems almost as painful as the sickness metastasizing in her body. After too many roles in which Liu’s ample skill set was reduced to a capacity to talk tough and kick ass, her tenderness and authenticity as Irene feels especially revelatory.

Yet if this were a fictional story, one might think it lays tragedy too thickly upon tragedy: a widowed woman… who learns she’s dying… risks losing control of a son with potentially violent mental health issues. Lin and screenwriter Marilyn Fu are almost too devoted to including all of these individual details as the story unfolds, in the process diluting some of the more precise insights about the characters. In particular, Joe’s fixation on school shootings seems understandably like a big red flag to anyone watching the film, but what gets slightly overshadowed is the fact that he’s afraid that one will happen, not determined to become a perpetrator.

Even so, its deeper observations about both Irene and Joe, and the community in which this tragedy occurred, remain pointed. Irene must maneuver around her own ingrained behaviors, and larger cultural norms, to seek help for Joe. And, even when she does that, she faces scrutiny from other parents, and patronizing treatment by school officials and authority figures, about which path is correct to take. But what soon becomes evident is that the quandary Irene and Joe face escalates primarily as the result of the two of them keeping secrets from one another — her to protect his feelings, and him because he feels he literally has to protect her.

In that regard, the film transcends the specificity of its characters and subject matter and becomes an imminently relatable story about the risks any family faces when their members are afraid or reluctant to address the problems that may be simmering (or in this case exploding) beneath the surface of a seemingly peaceful public front. At the same time, the number of hot-button topics that Lin touches upon — marginalized communities, mental health, school violence — tend to have the effect of flattening some of those greater truths.

Though the film may ultimately prove most effective as a showcase for a too frequently under-challenged actress to demonstrate the nuance and complexity she’s capable of, it also spotlights some vital and timely issues that seldom get enough attention anywhere, much less on film. Following in the footsteps of Dìdi, Smoking Tigers and even Bing Liu’s Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap (not to mention The Farewell, Turning Red, Chang Can Dunk…), Lin’s debut further amplifies an emerging trend of stories offering more authentic portraits than ever before of Asian and Asian American communities. Thanks to Liu as both performer and producer, Rosemead not only earns its place among those films’ superlative ranks, but achieves a surprisingly powerful balance between intimate cultural authenticity and urgent, universal relevance.