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 way 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