Crazy Rich Asians

“Okay,” I thought. “You win, Crazy Rich Asians. I’ll bite. This is the must-see movie of the summer? Then, I must see it.”

Last weekend, I explained to my husband why I wanted to see this movie by asking, “When was the last time you saw a movie with an entirely Asian cast focused on what it’s like to be an Asian American trying to navigate Asian culture?”

My husband got my point immediately even before I continued, “Because I haven’t seen a movie like that since maybe The Joy Luck Club, and that was like thirty years ago.”

“Mr. Sulu is in the new Star Trek movies,” my mom piped up from the kitchen. “He’s played by that Asian actor.”

“Yes, John Cho, but that’s not really what I mean,” I clarified. “There are movies with Asian characters, yes. But this movie is about the Asian American experience. There are tons of movies about the African American experience…”

“But not as many about the Latino experience,” observed my dad.

“True,” I agreed, “but I’ve still seen some of those, more and more all the time. And obviously the white American experience is well represented…”

“Lucy Liu is Chinese,” my mom pointed out.

“Yes, she is,” I allowed. “I’m not saying there are not Asian actors in movies. But like this movie is about an Asian American going to Singapore…”

“In that new James Bond movie, he goes to Singapore,” said Mom.

“In Skyfall?” I asked. “I thought they were in Macau.”

“But he has dinner in Singapore,” Mom replied. “I think it’s in the other new one.”

“Well maybe,” I conceded. “I don’t really remember. James Bond goes everywhere. But I’m talking about a movie entirely about Asian Americans navigating Asian culture.”

“Like The Good Earth,” said my dad.

“Okay, yes!” I exclaimed in relief. “That’s kind of what I mean. That is about Asian culture. But that’s been what…seventy years ago? Eighty years ago? And Flower Drum Song was also decades ago, and maybe not very authentic. And The Joy Luck Club came out when I had just started high school.”

“Of course,” Dad continued, “the beginning of that Indiana Jones movie happens in Singapore.”

Letting that slide, I insisted, “But my point is, we never see movies about Asian Americans exploring what it means to be Asian and American.”

“Well, we never look for them,” said Dad. “But I’m sure they make them.”

“Do they?” I replied. “Because I go to movies all the time, and I never see trailers for any.”

“Ah,” said Dad. “Well maybe one day they will make one.”

“They just did make one,” I said. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

This conversation continued for forty-five minutes.  

(It reminded me of my favorite romantic comedy, While You Were Sleeping.  “Cesar Romero was not Spanish!”  “I didn’t say Cesar Romero was Spanish!  I said Cesar Romero was tall!”)

After all that, I definitely had to see the movie. I couldn’t subject my husband to such protracted torture and then not see the movie. It would have been anticlimactic.

I thought my husband would be interested, too, because he was born in Singapore and lived there as a small child. When he was young, he was looked after by his “Amma,” a woman named Tina who, according to my mother-in-law just sort of showed up and took the baby. She wasn’t a random stranger. She was sent by the company my father-in-law worked for, but apparently as soon as my husband was born, Tina appeared and whisked him off without waiting for his mother’s input. My in-laws have said that even on her day off, if my husband cried, she would just come and take him, anyway. As a result, my husband’s first language was a mix of Indonesian and Chinese. When the family moved back to the states when he was three, only his older brother could communicate with him at all. I’m sure he wondered what had happened to his Amma. That must have been a very bewildering experience for everyone.

But I thought seeing his birth place vibrantly captured on film would interest my husband. It did, and despite our mutual misgivings about the whole rom-com aspect going in, we both loved this movie. The ending is so powerful that you leave with an overwhelmingly positive impression of the film no matter what.

The Good:
For a rom-com, this movie is quite smart and makes a very clear point. Women help themselves by supporting and building up other women. When women denigrate one another and tear each other down, nobody wins.

The entire movie shows this message in practice, but in case we’re too dazzled by the opulence on screen to get the point, in one scene, the film’s protagonist, Rachel, literally expresses this philosophy out loud, clearly and directly. Granted, she’s just doing it to build an alliance with another woman (or put in more practical terms, to find a place to sit at a wedding), but Crazy Rich Asians beautifully illustrates the truth in this approach to the world, so it’s definitely not a throw-away line.

The movie is immediately engaging and always fun to watch. For one thing, it’s always a delight to watch crazy rich anybody on screen. Most of us are not crazy rich, so it’s like a guilty pleasure to peek in on these staggeringly opulent ways of living. Singapore certainly comes across well. What a beautiful place! Obviously, wealth can provide beauty in any location, but even the street vendors and food trucks and jungles and waterways of Singapore look amazing. I’d love to be able to take a family trip there one day and show the kids where their father was born.

Another fun aspect of the film involves the title. The lack of a comma emphasizes that these Asians are not crazy and rich. They are crazy rich. Crazy is being used as an adverb, modifying rich to let us know just how rich they are. But it lets us know something else, too. In this film, we don’t see some Westerner’s imaginary dream of “oriental” opulence and all this would entail. We get an actual look at the culture of these wealthy Chinese families who have settled in Singapore. It reminds me a little of the books in my Russian novel class (which focused on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev), in which all of the children of elite families have received expensive private educations (often abroad) and speak French and have developed an exclusive sub-culture that is pretty much unique to them. Not everybody in Singapore speaks English, but all the crazy rich people do, and most have studied in British boarding schools or universities. So we get this pocket of people who have their own culture that we rarely get to see. (The Young family seems to regard American accents and American culture as somewhat inferior, whereas the less elite (but still kind of wealthy) family of Rachel’s friend Peik Lin (Awkwafina) have studied in America and absolutely love American pop culture and slang.) For some reason, American movies rarely ever show us anything like this. I honestly have no idea if life in Singapore is really like what we see depicted in this film because I’ve never seen anything else to provide a frame of reference.

So it’s fun to see the beauty of Singapore, the gorgeous opulence that extreme wealth brings, and the niche culture of these wealthy Asian families (who are kind of crazy, too.  Let’s face it, all families are). But the characters and their stories are also quite engaging. The relationship between NYU economics professor Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) and Nick Young (Henry Golding), the “Prince William of Singapore” feels quite real. As my husband noted, they have a winning relationship dynamic and fantastic chemistry. It’s easy to believe in them as a couple and to root for the success of their romance. Any American family would surely consider Rachel quite a catch. It’s staggering and mind-flipping to watch her enter a world that regards her as bringing nothing to the relationship. The cultural disconnect there reminded me of that shocking intrusion at the end of Things Fall Apart.

Michelle Yeoh is also fantastic as Nick’s controlling mother Eleanor, a character I truly loved. (Like seriously, I was ready to marry her at the end. Of course, I think I’d be delighted to live in a secluded tower with Mother Gothel from Tangled, so my reactions may not be typical.) Besides Awkwafina (whose presence has been inescapable this summer) and Ken Jeong (who’s hilarious in a small role), Yeoh is really the only actor whose work I know well. The rest of the cast is quite talented, so I’m sure I’ve seen them here and there, but I didn’t really know anybody else. So Yeoh has the advantage of being a familiar face, but more than that, she gives a brilliant performance playing a really tricky character.

Actually, I was positive that I’d seen Lisa Lu, the actress playing Amma before, too, but I couldn’t place her. My husband and I were both pretty surprised to hear everyone calling Nick’s grandmother “Amma” because that’s what his family called the woman who cared for him as a baby.

Gemma Chan is fantastic as Astrid, an overwhelmingly sympathetic character. We also loved Nico Santos as Cousin Oliver “the rainbow sheep of the family.”

I have to say that after all the build up she’s been getting everywhere, I found Awkwafina a bit underwhelming in Ocean’s 8. I mean, she was good and everything, but usually someone who is supposed to be breaking out as the next big thing is better than good. Here, though, Awkwafina is really showcased, and she makes a much bigger impression. Some of her scenes are hilarious, and her presence is always welcome. Not only does she provide Rachel moral support, but she’s like the audience’s cool friend in the know, too. She’s pretty terrific in Crazy Rich Asians. Maybe not as good as popcorn and Coke, but that’s a tough act to follow.  I’d be happy to see more of her work in the future.

Best Scene:
The scene on the airplane near the end is worth the entire movie. Honestly, truly, even if you’ve hated the entire movie up to this point, after this scene, you’ll walk out of Crazy Rich Asians raving, “What a great movie!” That’s a bold statement, but I thought I was just being my usual weird self when I had an extreme reaction to the scene. Then after the movie, my husband confessed that he felt the exact same way.

“How did I not see that coming?” I wondered again and again. “They set it up perfectly, even pointedly. Yet somehow I had no idea that would happen.”

My husband felt the same way. Now possibly, we’re just stupid. I will say that about eighty percent of the time, I can predict every single thing that happens in a movie. Then the other twenty percent, I’m like, “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time??? WHAT???!  I didn’t even know Bruce Willis was in that movie!” (And my sister even spoiled the end of that one for me before I saw it!) What I’m saying is, though I’m ordinarily a shrewd movie water, if it’s one of those other times, the movie will manage to blindside me totally. So I’m not sure here if the movie is being tricky or I’m being vacant.

Either way, whether you see it coming or not, what the movie does here is wonderful. I mean, Rachel studies game theory, and sometimes the only winning move is to give your opponent the winning move. This moment is really just so awesome. I was stunned by its emotional resonance. I was not expecting to have such an intense reaction. I did not realize that I cared that much, but apparently, I did.

This is a very smart rom-com about smart, powerful women making good choices.

Just remembering this scene right now is making me want to go watch the movie again. In fact, I really might read the book.

Best Scene Visually:
That wedding may have cost an obscene amount of money, but it is gorgeous, especially the moment when the bride walks up the aisle. The reception is absolutely gorgeous, too, like one of those obscene, surreal party scenes in that Italian film The Great Beauty.

What’s even better is how horrible, grotesque, and nightmarish it becomes once Rachel’s mood changes. What a beautiful dramatization of the pathetic fallacy, from dream to nightmare! This dramatic change also seems like a meditation on the nature of extreme wealth and pleasure. It’s all so tenuous. Is something beautiful or awful, sublime celebration or disgusting excess? It so often depends on point-of-view, even mood, timing.

Best Action Sequence:
I love the gutting episode with the fish. It makes me want to say to those other girls, “Gee, I wonder why he doesn’t want to marry you? You seem like such a catch!”

The Negatives:
I really like Astrid, and I think her storyline is extremely underdeveloped. When we were trying to figure out the meaning of the mid-credits scene, my husband and I discovered that much of Astrid’s storyline in the book was cut from the movie for time. This is not surprising because it feels kind of incomplete as we watch. I’m not sure this is something the movie can help, though.

As I watched, I was surprised by the introduction of the Astrid storyline in the first place. For a minute, I thought, “Oh, I assumed this was a straight up rom-com about this couple. Is it actually like The Joy Luck Club with multiple, equally important storylines?” But then it wasn’t. We pretty much got just the main couple and then some time here and there devoted to the unhappiness of Nick’s sister.

I found that a little confusing, so maybe the movie should have reduced Astrid’s role even further. Another solution would be to enlarge the role of Astrid and also give time to young Eleanor,  dramatize the backstory of Rachel’s mother (Kheng Hua Tan), and maybe even talk more about the couple getting married. But I mean, if the book doesn’t do that, why should the movie?

So I don’t know how to solve the problem exactly. I just think the movie would benefit from either more or less Astrid. Since I loved Astrid, I’d vote more.

Overall:
Crazy Rich Asians is a great romantic comedy, and honestly, writing about it has made me want to watch it again right now. I’m pretty sure my daughter would love it, and I think my mom might like it, too, so it has multi-generational appeal. To his surprise, my husband liked it just as much as I did. The story is smart, but more than that, it’s wise. I loved the humor and the heart of this movie, and I’m probably going to buy the book as soon as I post this review.