'Blue Bayou' Review
R: Language throughout and some violence
Runtime: 1 Hr and 59 Minutes
Production Companies: Entertainment One, MACRO
Distributor: Focus Features
Director: Justin Chon
Writer: Justin Chon
Cast: Justin Chon, Alicia Vikander, Mark O'Brien, Linh Dan Pham, Sydney Kowalske, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Emory Cohen
Release Date: September 17, 2021
In Theaters
Antonio LeBlanc is a Korean adoptee raised in a small town in the Louisiana bayou. He's married to the love of his life, Kathy, and raising his beloved stepdaughter, Jessie. Struggling to make a better life for his family, he must soon confront the ghosts of his past after learning that he could be deported from the only country he's ever called home.
Let’s be honest… the only heartwarming moments in Justin Chon’s melodrama come relatively really early where you see the LeBlancs act like a down-to-earth family. The loving dynamic between Antonio, his wife Kathy, and stepdaughter Jessie has such sweet moments long before shit hits the fan. Despite how I feel about the direction, which I will touch on in a moment, the sentimental scenes that hold weight come when Antonio and Jessie hang out together in the Louisiana bayou and the camera displays them in a handheld fashion to evoke a vérité-like style.
Chon has proven to be a strong actor time and time again and his performance here is relatively good. Since he’s doing triple duty with directing, writing, and acting, his strongest suit is the latter. He holds his own and has strong chemistry with the outstanding Alicia Vikander, who does a fantastic job portraying his wife and tries to fight alongside him during his time of need. I found myself genuinely swept up by his performance that the most heart-tugging moments are effective because of his soulful dedication to the role. Everything else, on the other hand… Oooooh boy.
Blue Bayou finds Justin Chon doing his best Dan Fogelman (This is Us, Life Itself) by crafting an unfocused and egregiously frustrating melodramatic film that tries too hard to be Oscar bait and comes off as a sloppy telenovela. The film’s setup is absolutely ripe for the drama where ex-criminal Antonio (Justin Chon) and his wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander), who is pregnant with their first child together, are harassed by her ex-husband Ace who’s a cop (Mark O’Brien) that abuses the law. Ace keeps ringing up Kathy’s line so he can see their kid, Jessie. To make matters worse, he and his cartoonishly racist partner violently assault Antonio at a supermarket in front of his wife and kid. Ace ends up putting Antonio in jail and when he gets into the system, they come to realize that Antonio is an undocumented citizen and must be deported. Since this takes place in the late 2000s where flip phones were the rage and nobody could film police brutality, the options for Antonio are very limited.
At this point, I’m thinking a riveting drama centered around American immigration policy will take place, but the film drowns itself with overly saccharine melodrama. From the moment Antonio and Kathy are told about Antonio’s predicament, the narrative busts open a treasure trove of cliches from the drama 101 playbook and beat you over the head with schmaltziness and threads that come out of nowhere in order to make it feel like five different movies rolled into one. The obstacles that stack up against the LeBlancs, primarily Antonio, are large in number and he keeps making more for himself. At the beginning of the film, his only conflict was paying his monthly fee to continue working at the tattoo parlor he’s an artist at. Come deportation, he has to come to grips with his future, find a way to earn quick cash to hire a lawyer for his case, reunite with his adopted mother that he lied to his wife about, and most of all deal with the dipshit cop who relentlessly harasses the family and kickstarted the entire plot. In the midst of all this, Antonio befriends Parker (Linh Dan Pham), a Vietnamese woman dying of breast cancer who’s looking to give her life some excitement. She comes out of nowhere as a supporting character from an entirely different movie. It feels so unfocused. Through their friendship, Antonio somehow has to come to terms with his tragic upbringing as a baby in Korea and it never feels in tune with the primary conflict at hand. For a movie that’s supposed to discuss deportation laws in America, it swerves into the opposite direction and avoids it completely for the sake of random and underdeveloped sentimentality.
Though Justin Chon is great in his performance, his character Antonio is such a frustrating lead to follow. When the going gets tough and you’re already genuinely sympathizing for him, he starts making the most impulsive decisions to add more problems to his already full platter. The more time you spend with him, the more annoyed you get because his actions get dumber and dumber. The worst thing is how easily you can predict all the stupid shit he’s about to do when so many of his issues would be resolved if he spoke to his wife, but you feel Chon’s need to drone out the melodrama that only comes across as forced. Every character aside from Antonio is damaged to some capacity and it never comes across as natural for the bigger picture. Everyone has some sort of bleak tragedy that makes you groan.
While the writing quality is on the same level as a daytime soap opera, the direction is also pretty telegraphed. The majority of the film is shot in handheld to evoke rawness but the camera is so damn shaky for the majority of the time that it’s distracting. There’s hardly any variety in shot composition to make it look cinematic despite the saturated color being pretty. There should’ve been more stabilization and less closeups to not have the emotions feel more manipulative than it already is.
While the melodrama was exhausting, I was intrigued about where the film would go. But oooh, this movie’s ending. This movie’s fucking ending… holy shit. I cannot express how much rage went through my veins when that ending occurred and dropped my rating like crazy. I’m not going to spoil what the final reel entails, but if you decide to see this movie, let’s just say it took one decision that made me audibly say, “Fuck you, movie.” If you’re a marginalized viewer who can’t stand cops, then this movie’s finale will piss you off. I have not seen another movie that made my blood boil as this ending did. The way Chon tries to wring tears out of his audience ends up becoming what is to me the absolute worst and white audience-geared finale I’ve ever seen in my life… or at least this year alone. I tried to be fair and nice but Blue Bayou sits on the same shelf as Life Itself where it suffers from egregiously poor writing, overreliance on unearned sentimentality, and shoddy filmmaking to manipulate your emotions. This completely unfocused and hollow melodrama may feature decent performances by the cast, but that finale is so unbearable that I felt absolutely offended. God.
