"How am I supposed to care for him, when he didn't care for us?"
This is a slow film, especially at its beginning, and it deals with the depressing subject of an old man beginning to die, so it won't be for everyone. His situation is even sadder because he's not close to his adult children, having made decisions in his life that his younger, more idealistic self would not have thought possible. In these reflections at the end of life, flashbacks to the past with regret, and ghostly visits, I saw a little bit of Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Hawaiian style. In this case, the man chose to spend time drinking and playing pool rather than being with his kids, and after his wife passed away, they lived with their aunt. There is a touching parallel between his life story to the changes to Hawaii, with scenes showing statehood and massive development.
In the present, the man calls his son on the east coast in the middle of the night, which is in the wee hours given the time difference, and his son hangs up on him. His daughter provides some care but doesn't really want to be there, and another son is present but has some form of mental disability, which while presenting challenges, gives him insight into the spirit world. One of his adult grandsons isn't close to him and feels like the old man never really liked him, but finds himself in the awkward position of trying to fill in as a caretaker one day. Meanwhile, the old man is mostly uncommunicative to those around him, sometimes confused, and sometimes able to say a few things or crack a joke.
Aside from the reminder of our mortality and how bleak it can be without loved ones, the question which forms is how could it have come to this? We see him as a young man walking on a deserted beach with a girl he's fallen in love with, and together with the beautiful cinematography, it all seems very idyllic. Eventually the events in the man's life are revealed, but I won't spoil them. I think the film would have been stronger had it included more flashbacks to show these events rather than telling us about them through the wife's prophecies in the past though, and it probably should have avoided repeating the line "dying isn't it simple, is it," which started feeling a little trite. On the other hand, putting the image of the younger self wondering why he would have abandoned his kids next to the older self lying on his deathbed was pretty powerful.
Offsetting some of the darkness of death and regret is an expression of a larger spirit world, of how death isn't the end, and how a sense of tranquility can be achieved. How well these work for you may depend on your personal views, but to me they didn't ring true, or in any event, weren't rendered as artistically as they could have been. Overall though, it's a movie I liked more as it went along, and I thought it was worth seeing.
