By Thomas M. Puhr.
While occasionally touching and buoyed by across-the-board strong performances…the resulting film is excessively earnest at best, and manipulative at worst.”
Patrick Dickinson blends the multigenerational family portrait, fish-out-of-water tale, and couple-grapples-with-Alzheimer’s drama to middling effect in Cottontail (2023). It seems the writer-director figured that if he checked off as many weepie subgenres as possible, then one of them was bound to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings; but by dipping his toe in all, he satisfies none. While occasionally touching and buoyed by across-the-board strong performances (especially by Shoplifters star Lily Franky), the resulting film is excessively earnest at best, and manipulative at worst.
Franky is Kenzaburo Oshima, a widower reeling from the death of his beloved wife, Akiko (Tae Kimura). The film begins on the day of Akiko’s funeral, with the bereaved husband getting drunk at the sushi restaurant where the couple (played in flashback by Yuri Tsunematsu and Kosei Kudo, respectively) first met. His son, Toshi (Ryô Nishikido), later retrieves him from his musty apartment, splashes some water on his face, and practically drags him to the ceremony. Clearly, the grief-stricken husband is not ready to accept that she is gone.
At the funeral, an abbot reveals that Akiko has one last gift for her husband: a secret letter she wrote shortly before her death. It contains her dying wish: that her ashes be spread at England’s Lake Windermere, where she spent an idyllic childhood chasing rabbits (hence, the title) with her father. With Toshi, daughter-in-law Satsuki (Rin Takanashi, who was so wonderful in Like Someone in Love), and granddaughter Emi (Hanii Hashimoto) in tow, Kenzaburo travels from Tokyo to England to carry out this final request. Requisite life lessons ensue.
Thankfully, Dickinson shifts away from these characters (though the Hindses get top billing in the film’s promotional materials) and reunites Kenzaburo with his family for a climactic scattering of the ashes. These closing scenes strive to hit all the expected beats – Kenzaburo learns to open up to his son, Toshi learns to be a little more patient with his father, etc. – but, because Toshi is absent for long stretches of the England-set sequences, they don’t carry the emotional weight they should.
Closing scenes strive to hit all the expected beats… [but] the result is an ending that feels contrived rather than cathartic.”
Dickinson takes a more grounded – and emotionally challenging – approach to characterization in this opening act. Whereas a lazier writer would have presented the elderly Kenzaburo as a mean old coot with a heart of gold (it’s easy to imagine an American remake with a loveably cranky Tom Hanks in the role), Dickinson instead gives us a tired, sad man who masks his unbearable grief – an early scene hints at thoughts of suicide – with a stoical exterior. We see the damage this opacity has wrought when the family gathers in his apartment after the funeral. While Toshi and Satsuki go through Akiko’s belongings, Kenzaburo laconically smokes a cigarette and watches a horse race on TV. A teary-eyed Toshi hugs him. “What are you doing?” the father asks, not in anger but genuine confusion, as if the gesture is completely alien to him. Dickinson applies the same raw pathos to flashback scenes in which a stubborn Kenzaburo struggles to care for Akiko by himself. To the director’s credit, he doesn’t shy away from the ugly reality of Akiko’s illness but highlights how dirty (literally) and emotionally draining it can be for both the afflicted and their loved ones.
Once the narrative relocates to England, however, Cottontail loses this subtle touch and meanders too much for its own good. The father-son relationship, by far the most interesting character dynamic, gets sidelined when an argument between Toshi and Kenzaburo prompts the latter to strike out on his own to Lake Windermere. After his phone dies and he boards a train in the wrong direction, Kenzaburo finds himself hopelessly lost. Wandering the English countryside, he stumbles upon a farmhouse and asks for help from its occupants: John (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter, Mary (real-life daughter Aoife Hinds).
Not only has this family suffered a similar loss – the recent death of John’s wife allows the grey-bearded farmer to offer convenient advice about how he never would’ve made it if not for his daughter – but they’re also more than happy to drive this strange man who showed up at their doorstep more than 100 miles to Lake Windermere. Both the ride and gently delivered advice are free: not a bad deal, considering this is the first and only place to which Kenzaburo stops after getting lost. Narrative coincidences usually don’t bother me much, but this farmhouse interlude strained my suspension of disbelief to its breaking point. Kenzaburo should count himself lucky, in knocking on the door of a remote farmhouse, for not being in a Blumhouse movie.
Thankfully, Dickinson shifts away from these characters (though the Hindses get top billing in the film’s promotional materials) and reunites Kenzaburo with his family for a climactic scattering of the ashes. These closing scenes strive to hit all the expected beats – Kenzaburo learns to open up to his son, Toshi learns to be a little more patient with his father, etc. – but, because Toshi is absent for long stretches of the England-set sequences, they don’t carry the emotional weight they should.
The result is an ending that feels contrived rather than cathartic. Dickinson, who ultimately lacks his actors’ subtlety, makes the fatal error of announcing how we ought to feel right when he should trust us to get there ourselves.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.