I Was a Simple Man

 "Maybe we don't deserve to... go so easily" someone says at the beginning of I Was a Simple Man, while discussing a botched suicide. Those words are spoken to the protagonist, Masao (Steve Iwamoto) and hang heavy over the rest of the movie.

 Set in Hawai'i, mostly in run down suburbs and back roads with the island's natural beauty in the background, the film calmly follows Masao in his daily routines and eases us slowly into his world. A widower grandfather of three with an uneasy, somewhat distant relationship with his sons, he lives alone with his regrets and grapples with the onset of an unspecified terminal disease.

 As his condition worsens first his daughter (Chanel Akiko Hirai), then a grandkid (Kanoa Goo) come to attend him and the film's point of view disassociates from Masao and starts tracking not just his family, but their memories, filling us in on the specifics of how this broken man failed his children, and later on, why. These memories don't just take the form of flashbacks; Early on the ghost of his wife Grace (Constance Wu) takes a permanent place by Masao's bedside.

 The cast, consisting mostly of unknown/TV actors (plus Constance Wu), is uniformly great, and so are the compositions (DP: Eunsoo Cho). There are a lot of elements I probably missed, as the film specifically addresses Japanese and Chinese Heritage in the island, and the island's induction into statehood (something also addressed by civilization receding on many of the flashbacks, and later as Masao's condition unravels and the jungle consumes his world).

Writer/director Christopher Makoto Yogi has crafted a beautiful, compassionate drama tinged at the edges with surrealist and supernatural, or more accurately spiritual, touches. It's a sedate, stately film with an almost Malikian appreciation of the natural world that builds to some very powerful scenes as the threads start melding into each other (in another Malik-like touch). The deliberate pacing and extremely melancholy tone may be a bit of a hurdle, but it's worth persevering. I liked this one a lot.