Review: I Was a Simple Man Is a Mournful Meditation on Mortality and Statehood

The film’s quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.

I Was a Simple Man
Photo: Strand Releasing

The Hawaii portrayed in writer-director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I Was a Simple Man is at once familiar and disconcertingly alien. Yogi suffuses the film in the undeniable beauty of the state, from capturing serene images of sandy white beaches to tropical trees swaying in the breeze. It’s a tactile world that reverberates with the metaphysical, where ghosts are just as common amid the landscape as the rolling green mountains.

In I Was a Simple Man, the past mingles seamlessly with the present, as does memory with reality, to create a kaleidoscopic and quietly uncanny narrative that wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself. The dying man in question is the elderly and eternally bullheaded Masao (Steve Iwamoto), who’s being begrudgingly cared for by some of his family members. And their feelings aren’t unfounded, as Yogi inconspicuously slides into the space of Masao’s memories to reveal that, after his wife passed away, Masao was a flaky, distant parent who even sent his daughter to live with someone else for a time due to his lack of desire in raising children.

By pairing snapshots of the often unpleasant care that he ailing Masao requires with poignant lapses into the past, Yogi portrays life’s final stretches as both a collective and individual experience. Yogi even expresses the inward nature of Masao’s decline in the form of another guest who visits Masao in his waning days: the spirit of his long-dead wife, Grace (Constance Wu). Though this results in some clumsy bits of business, given the occasional dialogue that unsubtly details Masao’s feelings of remorse and nostalgia, there’s a subtextual richness to the depiction of Masao and Grace’s relationship that offsets such minor flaws.

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Masao’s coming of age occurs during the pivotal period before and after Hawaii’s entry into the United States. Mirroring Masao’s confused time as a young man—which includes rebelling against his Japanese-born parents to court Grace, who’s of a different ethnic background—Yogi presents Hawaii’s myriad cultures under a succession of different leaderships as being responsible for the archipelago’s ongoing identity crisis. Yogi makes Masao a symbol of Hawaii itself, and when Grace pointedly dies on the same day that Hawaii attains statehood, the film conveys an intriguing sense of aimlessness in Masao’s life during these flashbacks, suggesting that both Masao and Hawaii must yet again reevaluate their identity and purpose.

Yogi so lovingly and richly captures Hawaii that at times its palpable presence almost makes it feel like a character itself, and a more prominent one than Masao. But to simply say that I Was a Simple Man is imbued with an acute sense of place seems reductive. And with a casual disregard for the laws of nature and linear time, the film doesn’t just create a strong sense of place—it makes the place come strikingly and hypnotically alive.

Score: 
 Cast: Steve Iwamoto, Constance Wu, Tim Chiou, Kanoa Goo, Chanel Akiko Hirai, Boonyanudh Jiyarom  Director: Christopher Makoto Yogi  Screenwriter: Christopher Makoto Yogi  Distributor: Strand Releasing  Running Time: 100 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Wes Greene

Wes Greene is a film writer based out of Philadelphia.

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