117 min | R | September 17, 2021 | Focus Features
Antonio LeBlanc has lived in Louisiana since he was three, and a paperwork error from his adoption now puts him in line for deportation to a country he never knew. The premise is a gut punch. The execution keeps reaching for the next one.
Antonio LeBlanc is a Korean adoptee raised in Louisiana since age three. He works as a tattoo artist, lives with his pregnant wife and stepdaughter, and considers himself American in every way that matters. A run-in with police exposes a gap in his adoption paperwork. He faces deportation to a country he has no memory of. Justin Chon builds the film around a single cruel fact. The law does not care how American you feel.
Justin Chon plays Antonio as a man holding panic just under the surface. He keeps his voice low and his shoulders tight, a person rehearsing calm so his family will not see the fear. Alicia Vikander plays Kathy, his wife, with a steadiness that cracks in the right places. Her Louisiana accent never calls attention to itself. Sydney Kowalske plays the stepdaughter Jessie with an unguarded warmth that grounds the family scenes. Linh-Dan Pham, as a fellow immigrant facing terminal illness, gives the film its most restrained and affecting passages.
Justin Chon directs and writes, and the writing is where the strain shows. The film shoots on 16mm, and the grain and bloom of the format wrap the bayou in a soft, faded glow that suits the theme of memory. Cinematographers Matthew Chuang and Ante Cheng frame Antonio in tight handheld closeups that trap him inside his own face. The trouble is the script. Chon stacks crisis on crisis until the structure buckles under its own weight. Every scene reaches for tears, and the reaching becomes visible.
The film has a real subject and a real urgency. American immigration law does deport adoptees who were never naturalized by the parents who raised them. Chon clearly feels the injustice, and the feeling carries the strongest scenes. But he does not trust the material to land without amplification. The melodrama crowds out the documentary truth, and a story that needs no embellishment keeps getting it anyway.