Monthly Archives: September 2018

  • Crazy Rich Asians

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jon M Chu (2018)

    In June this year, the Los Angeles Times, in a piece headlined ‘Why the state of the big-screen summer comedy is no laughing matter’, drew attention to the declining box-office fortunes in recent years of summertime comedy releases.  Two months later, Crazy Rich Asians opened and topped the American box office for the next three weeks.   As of 22 September, Jon M Chu’s romantic comedy, made for $30m, has grossed $191.4m ($152.9m in the USA and Canada, $38.5m elsewhere).  On the film’s opening weekend, an estimated 38% of its audience was of Asian descent.  The numbers speak for themselves:  it’s undeniable Crazy Rich Asians, an adaptation by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim of a 2013 novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan, is already something of a commercial phenomenon.  A Hollywood comedy with a cast of almost exclusively Asian characters is highly unusual and it’s no surprise Asian-American viewers have flocked to see it.  A statistic that needs more explanation is the film’s 93% fresh rating, from 264 reviews, on Rotten Tomatoes –  because Crazy Rich Asians is offensively clichéd and manipulative.

    After a prologue in 1990s London and a few scenes in present-day New York, the action moves to and remains in Singapore, and revolves around a high society wedding taking place there.  Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), raised by a poor, single-parent mother, has worked her up to professor of economics at NYU.  She accepts an invitation from her boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) to accompany him to the wedding.  He will be best man to his boyhood friend Colin Khoo (Chris Pang), a super-eligible bachelor whose bride is fashion icon Araminta Lee (Sonoya Mizuno).  In America, Nick too works as an academic.  Rachel wasn’t aware until now that he not only belongs to one of Asia’s richest families but is heir to its real-estate empire.  In Singapore, Rachel finds herself on the receiving end of bitchy antagonism from other young women at Araminta’s bachelorette party, and the more restrained but intense animosity of Nick’s controlling mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), who expects her son to stay at home and marry one of ‘his own kind’.

    Quotes from the fresh reviews on Rotten Tomatoes typically praise Crazy Rich Asians both as progressive in terms of ethnic representation and as huge fun.  The two things are connected.   The people on screen can’t be funny because of  their ethnicity yet it’s most unlikely that so many reviewers would be enthusing about the film if its characters were crazy rich Caucasians.  This is an enjoyable movie for plenty of right-minded critics because ‘diversity’ is intrinsically a feelgood factor – such a potent one that the critics concerned take cultural novelty for cultural insight, and a very indulgent view of Jon Chu’s machinery.  He plays the scenario both ways, gently mocking the extravagant materialism on display while encouraging viewers to slaver over the conspicuous wealth and the spectacle of Singapore’s wedding of the year.  He sets up conflicts only for them to be ignored when it comes to the audience-pleasing crunch.  The supposedly ingrained intra-Asian ethnic prejudices illustrated most extremely by Nick’s dragon-lady mother are swiftly dispelled in order to deliver a happy ending.  Hollywood romcom formula conquers all.

    It follows that the character types and the way they’re played are par for the course too.  Constance Wu is pleasant as Rachel and does suggest, more than the script does, that the heroine has a sharp brain as well as a sweet nature.  Crazy Rich Asians would be more interesting if Nick struggled with the tensions caused by his love of Rachel and his mother’s expectations but the family ties don’t exert any pressure on him.  Until Rachel gets visibly upset, Nick seems rather blandly insensitive to her situation.  He’s then (repeatedly) politely apologetic.  The male-model woodenness of Henry Golding (known to me only as a presenter on the BBC News Channel’s travel show) doesn’t help.  Rachel has a kooky friend-confidante (Awkwafina).  Nick’s cousins include a chubby camp man (Nico Santos) and a gravely beautiful woman (Gemma Chan), whose husband (Pierre Png) is cheating on her:  her storyline seems meant to have serious weight.  By far the strongest and weirdest performance is from Michelle Yeoh, who makes Eleanor’s possessiveness of her son borderline incestuous, especially in a sequence where she helps him change his shirt.  Henry’s father, from whom Eleanor appears to have separated, is more conspicuous by his absence than may have been intended.

    Eleanor also appears in the 1995 prologue, along with her sister-in-law, her niece and the infant Nick.  They arrive in pouring rain at a London hotel.  The white manager and his underling subject them to abominable racism (the pair’s acting is abominable too).  The tosspots get their comeuppance when it turns out Eleanor’s husband has just bought the hotel – at a presumably early stage of his international business career.  Jon Chu seems to intend this illustration of old-time anti-oriental prejudice as a kind of foundation stone for what’s to follow but then goes all out to eclipse it.  (The sequence did stay in my mind but I’m always going to be more taken with a single scene in a wet hotel lobby than with lashings of preposterous luxury.)

    Chu’s rhyming scenes involving poker and Mahjong at opposite ends of Crazy Rich Asians work rather better.  At the start, Rachel, in her game theory class at NYU, plays poker with a student to demonstrate that, in games involving psychology and choice, ‘the key is playing to win, instead of trying not to lose’.  In her climactic game of Mahjong with Eleanor, Rachel intentionally loses the game – to reflect her self-sacrifice in refusing Nick’s proposal for the sake of preserving his family relationships.  Her noble action enables Eleanor – of course – to see the error of her ways and instantly shrug off generations of cultural tradition.   Rachel prepares to fly back to New York,  in the company of her mother (Tan Kheng Hua), who came over to Singapore at a crucial point in the story.  Nick boards the plane in time to propose to her a second time, now offering her Eleanor’s own engagement ring.  And she accepts.

    The success of Crazy Rich Asians recalls a major ethnic comedy hit of 2002 but My Big Fat Greek Wedding, written by and starring Nia Vardalos (and directed by Joel Zwick), was more modest, more  honest and, for this viewer, a lot more fun.  I found this new film, at a minute over two hours, overlong and fairly dull, as well as annoying.  One of the small minority of negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes is M Faust’s in The Public.  This sums up the movie well:  ‘I guess it’s great that commercial films are being made to appeal directly to groups that have previously been relegated to Hollywood’s sidelines, but I can’t get excited that they’re being marketed the same generic crap as the rest of us’.

    18 September 2018

  • My Left Foot

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jim Sheridan (1989)

    The tendency of reviewers to recommend films featuring terminally ill and/or disabled characters as ‘remarkably unsentimental’ was strongly in evidence in the 1980s.   The praise was usually undeserved, even when, as in the case of Rain Man (1988), the promotion of the movie made shrewd play of the supposedly unsentimental treatment.  Two films, appearing at the start and the end of the decade, were exceptions:  David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot.  Lynch’s picture, not unexpectedly, is the more inventive piece of film-making and features a fine lead performance from John Hurt.   As a personality, though (as distinct from a moral symbol and an acting opportunity), John Merrick is a limited conception:  a sweet nature inside a hideous exterior.   In terms of characterisation of the protagonist, My Left Foot, subtitled ‘The Story of Christy Brown’, is the film that really bucked the trend.  It did so thanks to a fine screenplay by Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton, based on the writer and artist Christy Brown’s autobiography of the same name; and, in Daniel Day Lewis, to a lead actor ready – eager – to go unusually far and deep into character.

    Christy Brown was born into a working-class Dublin family in 1932.  He was one of twenty-three siblings, nine of whom died in infancy.  He was diagnosed shortly after birth with severe cerebral palsy.  His parents Bridget and Patrick were determined to raise him at home, along with their many other children, even though Christy was unable to walk or talk.  He was spastic in all his limbs except for the lower left leg.   With the encouragement of his parents, especially his mother, and, in his adolescence, a regularly visiting social worker, Christy learned to write and draw with his left foot.  He quickly matured into a serious artist.  His autobiography, published in 1954, was followed by other prose and poetry, and he continued to paint.  He died suddenly in 1981.

    The film’s narrative moves between present and past.  The former seems at first no more than a framing device.  Christy attends a charity event to celebrate the publication of his autobiography, at a grand house outside Dublin on a beautiful summer evening.  On arrival, he and his mother (Brenda Fricker) meet Mary Carr (Ruth McCabe), the nurse who will be Christy’s ‘handler’ for the next few hours.  Mary will push his wheelchair onto the stage once the preceding entertainment, from a group of classical musicians, is over.  In the meantime, in a reception room behind the concert area, the pair chat and – a nearly inevitable consequence of Christy’s cussed nature – argue.  Mary also starts reading a copy of My Left Foot.  Into this framework, Jim Sheridan incorporates extended flashbacks to Christy’s earlier life.  These are the guts of the story but the meeting with Mary turns out to be important too.  The evening ends, as does the film, with the two of them driving further out into the countryside and drinking champagne together.  A closing legend on the screen explains that they married in 1972.

    Sheridan’s realisation of the Brown household during Christy’s childhood, with the teeming family crammed into their small home, is very convincing.  Hugh O’Conor, as the child Christy, has an intense eccentricity that paves the way for Daniel Day Lewis.  Mrs Brown, eloquently played by Brenda Fricker in her role of a lifetime, is the heart of the family:  it’s her quiet, utter steadfastness as well as her perennially pregnant state that makes Christy’s mother such a large, enduring presence.  Ray McAnally, in one of his last performances, is differently formidable as Christy’s heavy-drinking, more volatile father.  The social worker who helped assist Christy’s progress becomes the presumably fictional Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw), a doctor working with cerebral palsy patients to improve their speech and movement.  Eileen moves in cultural circles and it’s through her contacts that she arranges both the first public exhibition of Christy’s art work and the later charity event hosted by Lord Castlewelland (Cyril Cusack).

    Eileen is also the woman with whom Christy first falls in love.  They go out for dinner with her friend Peter (Adrian Dunbar) and others after Christy’s exhibition opens at Peter’s gallery.  Christy is, in both senses of the word, intoxicated until Eileen takes the opportunity to announce her engagement to Peter.  Christy, in his distorted, effortful speech, articulates the word ‘Congratulations’ – as he makes his way from the first to the last of the five syllables, his voice is increasingly anguished and vengeful.  He then says, ‘I’m glad you taught me to speak so I could say that, Eileen’, before beating his head repeatedly on the restaurant table.  This scene is the culmination of My Left Foot‘s near subversiveness in its treatment of a disabled central figure.  Christy’s behaviour comes as a shock not only to the cultured Dubliners who’ve virtually adopted him as an expression of their avant-garde broad-mindedness but also to audiences with a built-in predisposition to feel essentially sorry for disabled characters.  You do still feel sorry for Christy here:  but you’re aware too that he’s behaving badly on purpose, aware that he’ll create a bigger impact – and make it harder for his companions to object to his anti-social performance – because of how he physically is.

    Although the film is far from biographically accurate, Christy Brown really did marry a woman called Mary Carr in 1972 but she was neither a nurse nor Irish nor, it seems, good for Christy.  According to Wikipedia, Carr was English, Brown met her at a party in London and they started an affair.  This led to his ending a relationship of several years with an American woman called Beth Moore (who doesn’t feature in the film).   Also according to Wikipedia:

    ‘Brown’s health deteriorated after marrying Carr. He became mainly a recluse in his last years, which is thought to be a direct result of Carr’s influence and perhaps abusive nature. … Brown died at the age of 49 after choking during a lamb chop dinner.  His body was found to have significant bruising, which led many to believe that Carr had physically abused him. …’

    Playing fast and loose with the facts of Christy Brown’s biography isn’t a problem to the extent that Jim Sheridan’s clear primary purpose is to celebrate an extraordinary, heroic life.  It’s surprising, nevertheless, that Sheridan doesn’t acknowledge how freely he and Shane Connaughton have adapted the true story and, more particularly, that he retains the name Mary Carr.

    This is one reason why, revisiting My Left Foot, I found it less impressive than I did when seeing it (twice) at the time of and shortly after its original release.   The film is well structured and paced.  The main strength of Jack Conroy’s cinematography is in how imaginatively it conveys the cramped spaces of the Browns’ home; there’s also a vivid Halloween sequence during Christy’s childhood – scary masks and fireworks in the night sky, seen from the little boy’s dazzled point of view.   Some of the other illustrations of robust community are more obvious than I’d remembered, particularly a punch-up that breaks out at the wake for Christy’s father.  I never liked Fiona Shaw as Eileen:  it’s the actress, as much as the character she’s playing, who seems to be bidding for attention.  Ruth McCabe is likeable as Mary and there’s a spark between her and Daniel Day Lewis.  It makes emotional sense too that she has the look of a younger version of Christy’s mother but the scenes featuring Mary become a little too drawn out and repetitive.  (Probably just me but she also looked to be reading Christy’s book backwards.)  Elmer Bernstein’s score is busy and too conventionally Hollywood for the material.

    Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is admirable as a technical achievement; what makes it exceptional is its daring wit.   The tones he gets into Christy’s torturous voice give depth, bite and wonderful humour to his persistent sarcasm.  Day Lewis’s dark-bearded physicality has an almost satyr-like quality – it’s an expression of the strength of Christy Brown’s appetite for, and determination to have his fill of, a life he seemed fated to be cut off from.  Day Lewis’s much vaunted commitment to his art has sometimes raised suspicions that he makes too much of immersive research and preparation for a role.  With his best work, however, you can only feel grateful for this – and to him.  His portrait of Christy Brown remains my favourite of all his performances.

    13 September 2018

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