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Chon gives a remarkable performance as Antonio. It is often the quieter moments that are able to communicate the most, and it’s a pity that the script he also penned doesn’t have as much faith in this character and his story as it should... Buried in this mixed bag is a great film here buckling under the weight of too many fix-ins, and it’s a real shame.

"Blue Bayou" is sunk, on occasion, by its own symbolism, and how it wields said symbols... The uncompromising ending is far more effective than any monologue about fleur de lis or dreamy shots of hands floating through blue water.

Chon’s ambitions are astonishing, but his bloated script needed an edit or two. It’s a film written with big moments for big performances in mind, which is too painfully obvious as the film treads on. Chon definitely has the chops to be a thoughtful, dramatic director, but too often gets in his own way with his aspirations.

The love between Antonio and Jessie is not enough to hold the film together. We get a smattering of piercing thoughts about family separation as sanctioned by the U.S. government and a roster of deeply felt performances, but not the vision to see it through.

It’s in Antonio’s love for his wife and children, and his fear of losing them, that “Blue Bayou” finds a core of wrenching emotional honesty that survives its more manipulative impulses.

As Antoni’s life unravels through the second half, Chon slips from a delivery that is customarily moody to something almost overwrought, closer to melodrama. This is also when the film gets better. Just like the Disneyworld sequence at the end of "Florida Project" enlivened its otherwise sentimental delivery, "Blue Bayou" is more interesting when Chon moves beyond realism and into fantasy.

[The threats to Antonio's life] give the film a slow, sad drip of inevitability that’s lightened by the warmth and naturalism of Chon’s performance... And as the faces and fates of real-life adoptees scroll past in a moving coda, Chon forces us to acknowledge how easily those who believe themselves settled can become in an instant displaced and dispossessed.

Wouldn’t it be shortchanging this story not to show a wrenching parent-child separation? But you also wonder if there couldn’t have been a way to tell this story that could hang onto the lyricism and the vivid sense of place that initially distinguished “Blue Bayou,” while ditching some of the melodrama that eventually takes it over.

Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.

Chon keeps adding layer upon layer of drama — make that melodrama — to the narrative, stuffing it with filigrees of backstory and unnecessary incidents until his film ultimately climaxes, and collapses, in an implosion of emotional excess.

An eye-opening sob-fest that eventually loses sight of its everyday tragedy behind a thick veil of tears...“Blue Bayou” stagnates in some of the places where it ought to have soared.

Timely but tediously overwrought, ["Blue Bayou"] abounds in a wealth of ideas concerning the complex and, it turns out, legally contested national identities of people born in Asia and raised in the United States. But Chon fails to distill those ideas into an affecting narrative, a result of them also having to compete with the tear-jerky sentimentality of his script.