Sundance review: 'I Was a Simple Man' is a beautifully rendered story of a dying man facing the ghosts and regrets of his past

‘I Was a Simple Man’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 100 minutes.

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Beautiful and elegiac, writer-director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man” is a profoundly moving ghost story about a man reflecting on his regrets as he prepares for the end of his life.

Steve Iwamoto, in only his second screen appearance, gives an elegantly spare performance as Masao Matsuyoshi, a Japanese-American living in Hawai’i. He’s an old man, facing down some unnamed illness that will likely kill him sooner rather than later. He lives alone, sometimes helping his perpetually unemployed son, Mark (Nelson Lee), who says he talks to the family’s ghosts.

Masao has two other children: Henry, who lives on the mainland and is only present as an annoyed voice on the phone; and Kati (Chanel Akiko Hirai), who lives in town, on the other side of the island, and visits occasionally and reluctantly — leaving Masao’s care, toward the end, to his grandson, Gavin (Kanoa Goo).

In an important way, though, Masao is not alone. He’s visited by the ghost of his wife, Grace (played by “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu). Grace has been gone some 60 years — she died on the day in 1959 when Hawai’i became the 50th state — and most of Masao’s regrets stem from what happened after Grace died.

Yogi shows us those days in flashback, with Tim Chiou playing Masao in 1959, and Kyle Kosaki playing him in 1941, opposite Boonyanudh Jiyarom as a young Grace. Past and present collide frequently in Yogi’s telling, one informing the other to paint a full picture of Masao’s life.

It takes a few minutes for a viewer to recalibrate their bearings to Yogi’s thoughtful, deliberate pacing. “Time moves differently out here,” Gavin remarks late in the film, long after the viewer has reached that conclusion. Within those slower rhythms, though, Yogi lets us appreciate the beauty of Hawai’i and the literally haunted mood it casts over Masao’s final days and his eventual peace.