Reel Rundown: Bring out the tissues for end-of-life ‘Goodbye June’ film

June Cheshire is dying.

She knows it, the doctors know it and so do the members of her family – at least some of them. Everyone else is either too young or too self-absorbed to understand, much less pay attention.

Of course, that’s been pretty much the story for the last couple of years. But now, just before Christmas, June’s cancer has progressed to the point where her bodily functions are finally shutting down.

So, it’s time for everyone to say their final goodbyes. And the whole point of actress/director Kate Winslet’s film “Goodbye June,” which is now streaming on Netflix, is to show how such farewells are necessary but seldom easy.

The situation is particularly hard for the Cheshire clan. For one thing, despite her tendency to make the occasional biting remark, June (Helen Mirren) is the family’s beloved matriarch, the foundation on whom the others depend.

Her caretaker son Connor (Johnny Flynn) is bereft at the thought of losing his mum, especially so because it’ll likely mean that he’ll then have to look after his seemingly addled father Bernie (Timothy Spall).

June’s three daughters, Julia (Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough) and Helen (Toni Collette) all react in ways that reflect their individual temperaments. Those ways are, respectively, officiously take-charge, argumentatively bossy and fashionably spiritual.

To complicate factors even more, Julia and Molly clash at every turn, the reasons for which only gradually become clear.

All of this makes for a film that explores an eventuality that most of us either have faced, or are likely to face, over the course of our lives: the loss of a loved one and the effect that loss has on those who are left to grieve.

In the case of “Goodbye June,” which is Winslet’s first venture as a director, those effects at first cause dissension. And not just between the sisters but between Connor and his father, not to mention between quarrelsome Molly and most everyone, including her mother’s care team.

Fear not, however, the film’s screenplay – which was written by Winslet’s son, Joe Anders – finds as happy an ending as is possible for a film about a parent’s impending death.

That ending doesn’t always feel plausible, and at certain junctures “Goodbye June” tugs at the heartstrings just a tad too much (one scene involving Bernie singing karaoke is a good example).

But behind the efforts of a talented cast that includes two Oscar-winning actresses (Mirren and Winslet), two Osar-nominated actresses (Collette and Riseborough) and others (especially Fisayo Akinade as a compassionate nurse), Winslet’s first filmmaking venture is bound to have some who watch it reaching for the occasional tissue.

Stories about moms dying can do that even to the most cynical among us.