July 21, 2022
Antonio Leblanc (Justin Chon) was a Korean boy put up for adoption by his impoverished mother. He was adopted by an American couple and brought to the US at age three, but things did not go very well for the young boy growing up in Lousiana. He had a couple of run-ins with the law stealing motorcycles, a record which made it difficult for him to find a good job. He could barely make ends meet working as a tattoo artist.
Antonio is now married to physical therapist Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and are now expecting a new baby. Antonio is also very close to Kathy's spunky daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), who hated her real father Ace (Mark O'Brien) who abandoned her as a baby. One day, an altercation with Ace's fellow policeman Denny (Emory Cohen) unearthed previously unresolved issues about Antonio's citizenship which could lead to his deportation.
This film deals with an issue that apparently affected several children adopted by American families who later face deportation as adults because their parents never processed their citizenship properly. These children grew up as Americans practically their whole lives, yet faced the prospect of being sent back to a home country they knew nothing about. It was a very interesting subject matter and full of dramatic possibilities.
Oscar winner Alicia Vikander played Antonio's supportive wife Kathy, whose patience (and singing chops) will challenged along the way. A major scene-stealer was the adorable child actress Sydney Kowalske as Jessie, whose scene at the airport was a major emotional highlight of the whole film. There was also an interesting side plot about Parker (Linh-Dan Pham), a Vietnamese woman who helped the lost Antonio gain proper perspective.
But this movie was all about the man who wrote, directed and acted in the lead role in this film -- Justin Chon. After breaking out in the Disney Channel movie "Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior" and the "Twilight" films, this Korean-American actor eventually turned to writing and directing his own films, making a big splash at Sundance in 2017 with "Gook," which won for him the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature Film and Best Director.
His performance of Antonio here in "Blue Bayou" was very sincere and nuanced. This man had a difficult life, he had a history for crime and violence, but you can still feel his inner goodness as a person. You can feel a tendency towards hard-sell melodrama in certain scenes, but you will get touched, or even shed a tear. Chon packed in a lot of heavy details which did bog the film down somewhat, but his passion to his mission was very clear. 8/10.
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