Crazy Rich Asians is yet another high water mark for this year’s crop of cross cultural comedies. I went into this quietly thinking what my friend has repeated every time we watched the trailer together, “Why does the humor of this movie look like it’s from the 90s?” He doesn’t want what he sees as a politically correct comedy and I, who wouldn’t mind seeing my own on screen being sexy, falling in love, being awful, terrible, and fully-formed human beings for once, was dreading a mediocre Asian Tyler Perry film replete with alienating in jokes. This film certainly wasn’t made for me, but it was made for my sister. It’s a clever, plucky fuck you to Hollywood nostalgia and modern whitewashing, and it does it all with pop culture references flying a mile a minute.
Saw this movie on opening night at an AMC theater and had two very different reactions at the line to go in. First of all, the inability to reserve seat at a blockbuster in its first weekend on AMC’s new subscription service is a lot like taking your attractive older cousin to prom: not optimal, borderline atrocious. We got there over an hour early expecting that we might have a little trouble finding seats and instead we stood outside and moved farther and farther from our original placement as the staff became increasingly unnerved about how many people had arrived (sold out crowd, for that showing at the following one at 10pm). Seldom have I been moved farther back before while waiting to see a rom com I’m lukewarm about on a Friday night, but this is the life we are living right now. AMC’s heinous lack of reserve seating anywhere within 40 miles of me is as bananas as Moviepass’s current business plan. That being said, cannot imagine how much more miserable I would be if I were paying for all the August movies I’ve seen this month, not to even mention the next three or four on the slate: including a muppet murder mystery, an indie movie about a burnt out rockstar and Chris O’Dowd, and hate-watching Puzzle when it finally becomes available. To the movie…
I started listening to the interviews with the director Chu and Awkwafina on public radio (how else are you gonna hear a song about someone’s vagina on NPR?) and that’s what really got me hyped for the movie. The director’s interview (which you can find for yourself on NPR and a lot of other platforms, I can’t find the exact one I heard and we’re in a rightful deluge of interviews right now, so I can’t imagine it’ll be a fruitful search) really keyed me in to how regular a guy he was, a lucky director who didn’t have to cut his teeth doing music videos and indie films before he was given a project like Step Up 2 (2008) or G.I. Joe: Retaliation with the Rock or even the dreaded sequel to Now You See Me, and then fell into Crazy Rich Asians after his mom and sister couldn’t stop raving about it. Worth a listen. Ditto that to anything the author of the book has to say about what it was like to try to get this thing on screen just a few years ago.
From the opening scene on, I was surprised by how much this movie took the gloves off when it went after the excesses of White Hollywood moviemaking. The catchy soundtrack of American classic pop from the ’90s and ’00s does a stealthy subversive job of shifting the culturally dominant perspective in a playful way (a joyful act of “de-centering”). The first scene is a big fuck you to Wes Anderson. Looks like a shot for shot remake of the set of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), only the staff are as unbearable as one can imagine toward an Asian family in any Wes Anderson film where dogs aren’t the main characters. More fuck yous: significantly, no one uses the “Voice”. The only time someone speaks in broken English for laughs is to make fun of actors who do it.
The film has a clever way of escalating wealth within the first act of the film: friends pick up Rachel and Nick early for the stag and doe parties. This disruption of our expectations brought on by the trailer gives us time to fall in love a little with Nick’s childhood friends, even as some of the major controversies of the story seem to center on the way that Araminta and Colin treat or don’t treat Rachel, how much their inaction is a function of their privilege or indifference. Rachel then stays with her old college friend Peik Lin Goh in her family’s mansion only to be told that Rachel’s boyfriend’s family is even more rich than that. It’s a nice way of ratcheting up the tension while also easing us into a conversation about the ethics of polite society apart from class privilege. There’s something really deft and Dickensian about the way that the story provides cover for these incredibly wealthy characters and makes them into fully-sketched humans.
Covers of American classics from the Big Band era make the music dynamic and subversive as the language, commenting on the long memory for American cinema in a punchy, wry way without veering off into kitsch. Kina Grannis (I’m hoping I’m not the only person left who remembers watching her budding career when she was first making a name for herself on YouTube and then when she finally won that SuperBowl contest to be in a commercial. I remember watching her covers of Hallelujah for months when I was homesick in college and even before then maybe. I turned to my wife in the wedding scene when she first appears and couldn’t contain myself, “That’s KINA GRANNIS!” I shouted at her, and she gave me this dead stare that made me question whether I was making a reasonable observation or not. Happiness is having the world recognize your good taste from time to time though, so I have no regrets.
Some novel contributions and innovations to the rom-com genre: wedding dresses with insults; airplane speech. The huge diversity of the Asian communities split the audience for jokes about different ethnic and class differences without punching down at all. Crazy Rich Asians is a cross-cultural movie that communicates “double consciousness” in a different way altogether to the forays into black surrealism from earlier this summer, including most recently BlacKkKlansman. Competing values of “Chinese” self-sacrifice for the good of the family and “American” self-made women, the drive to follow one’s passion set up for a good initial stumbling block for Rachel’s character, but the film is too smart to live and die on a single simplistic cultural difference, and evolves and pivots from that first complication several times very deftly. Wife says the sappy music and sentimental shots of the coastline were too much at times.
It’s worth the hype and will be a welcome addition to canon. Oh, and on a related note, my Wife and I just discovered a few weeks ago while babysitting this really awesome Canadian comedy that got picked up by Netflix recently called Kim’s Convenience. If you’re looking for a show that’s doing some very interesting things with comedy and with the immigrant voice and the shift in perspective away from the WEIRD, you should check out this series. It reminds me of so much of my family and it does a lot of cool things with large story arcs for a season, which is a hard landing to stick with televised comedies. Every episode has me doing a spit-take at something someone says or a way that they look that’s so spot on. Can’t stop talking about this show and I want to talk with all of you about it too.
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