Rosemead: Well-Acted Telling of True-Life Tragedy Offers Neither Remedy nor Catharsis

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

In Rosemead, Lucy Liu, the breakthrough Asian American action star, takes on her most intense dramatic role to date as Irene, a middle-aged Taiwanese immigrant driven to desperation.

Recently widowed, Irene is undergoing treatment for terminal cancer while trying to run her strip mall printing business in the Los Angeles suburb which gives the film its title. She also must cope with her 17-year-old son Joe (Lawrence Shou) who is struggling with worsening schizophrenia.

Such a confluence of challenges could be accused of unconscionable dramatic piling on if it weren’t for the fact that the film — directed by Eric Lin and co-written by Lin and Marilyn Fu — is based on real tragic events, reported in a 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times.

Joe, a sweet-faced former star student and swimmer, has been mentally and emotionally broken since the death of his father (played in flashbacks by Orion Lee). When he’s not turning his notebooks pages black with images of spiders, the boy is fixated with news stories about mass killings, an obsession exacerbated when his school runs an active shooter drill.

Joe doesn’t lack for conventional forms of social support, even if they all fail him. He’s seeing a counsellor, Dr. Hsu (James Chen) and his gal pal Jeannie (Madison Hu) seeks to continue including him in activities while fearfully noticing his changes.

Even the police, who pick him up jaywalking and incoherent, aren’t unsympathetic, though they warn Irene that, when he turns 18, he no longer has the protection of her supervision. School officials, who pressure Irene to transfer her son to a school for students with behavioural problems, make the right sympathetic noises.

Irene, ruled by shame and committed to secrecy by cultural tradition, can’t deal with the weight of reality. Her only partial confidant is a childhood friend Kai-Li (Jennifer Lim) who runs a nearby herbal medicine shop.

Irene refuses to tell Joe about her diagnosis, and when she hears neighbours at a party gossiping about Joe seeing a psychiatrist, she insists he’s going to the family centre to research a future possible career. At the same time, she’s privately terrified at the path he seems to be taking, leading to the film’s shocking conclusion.

For all its deeply compassionate intentions and the bruising performances by Liu and Shou, Rosemead feels not just raw but unfulfilled. It doesn’t help that several of the secondary performances are stilted and the script, spiraling over a few weeks, suggests the mechanics of an after-school special, checking various sociological boxes — school, medicine, law enforcement — without the relief of either remedy or catharsis.

In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

Rosemead. Directed by Eric Lin. Written by Lin and Marilyn Fu. Starring Lucy Liu, Lawrence Shou, Orion Lee, Jennifer Lim, Madison Hu, and James Chen. In select theatres January 9.