Then Cody is killed in an accident. Chip stays with Joey, whose treatment of him is a study in wisdom and love. The boy is so irrepressibly joyous that we sense what a happy life he has led. But Cody's sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew) reveals that her brother left a will years ago, granting her all of his property and custody of his child. This will, written after the death of Cody's wife and before he met Joey, has never been updated.
On Thanksgiving Day, Joey drops the boy off at the sister's house and never sees him again. A lawyer in his Tennessee town tells him flatly he doesn't have a child custody case, and no judge in the state will rule in his favor. Neither this lawyer nor anyone else ever uses the words "homosexual" or "gay." It isn't in any sense a "gay rights" film, nor is it an "Asian-American" film. It is about a father and son who have been separated against their wishes.
Its objectivity in these terms is possible because of Wang's extraordinary performance. I've been unable to discover any details about him, but he speaks in a relaxed, natural Tennessee accent and creates Joey as a particularly convincing character, a contractor who drives a red pickup truck. (Cody was a schoolteacher.) His own parents died when he was very young. He was adopted by foster parents, who gave him their name, and who died when he was a teenager. As a man of Asian birth who has been raised apart from other Asians, as an orphan and a foster child who for years had no family, we sense how important stability and continuity are to him.
And there is something else. Without ever making a point of it, he has been treated as an outsider. Wang, as director, indicates this by several scenes with the back of the character's head to the camera, so that we see the other characters from his POV, instead of seeing Joey mixed in visually. He is not a hothead, not neurotic, not psychologically damaged, but in this crisis, the entire basis of his being has been challenged. Having seen Cody, we can feel certain he would have granted custody to Joey if he had ever made another will. Cody's sister doesn't see it that way. What does she think about homosexuality? She never says.
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