by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I eventually watched a movie that we both quite
liked, Jon M. Chu’s romantic/screwball comedy Crazy Rich Asians, based on a book (the first in a trilogy) by Kevin
Kwan with the same title as the film. The film’s novelty was that it was shot
with an entirely Asian cast (though the leading man, drop-dead gorgeous Henry
Golding, is the product of an English father and a Malaysian mother) and it was
produced mostly on location in Malaysia and Singapore. Aside from that, it’s
pretty much your standard-issue Cinderella story but told with the sort of
loopy wit with which such stories were presented in the 1930’s screwball
comedies that are the true inspiration of the film. Screwball comedy was a genre that emerged in the 1930’s that essentially democratized
movie comedy — instead of leaving the business of making people laugh largely
to the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd that had dominated
movie comedy in the 1920’s (and the ones like Laurel and Hardy, the Marx
Brothers and W. C. Fields that had largely taken over that task in the early
sound era), screwball gave a way for actors best known for dramatic roles to
play comedy. Actors like Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Fredric
March, and actresses like Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck
and Katharine Hepburn were able to make screwball films in between romantic
melodramas and dramas.
Crazy Rich Asians’ most obvious commonality with 1930’s screwball is the big class
conflict at the heart of the story; the screwball writers liked to throw either
a rich person in among the not-so-rich or a not-rich person among the rich, and
that’s what Kevin Kwan did when he wrote the novel Crazy Rich Asians and screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lin kept
when they adapted it. When the film begins, Chinese-American economics
professor Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) has been dating Nick Young (Henry Golding)
for quite a while. It’s not explained just what career Nick has been pursuing
in the U.S., but he seems quite settled here when suddenly he receives an
invitation to return to his native Singapore (ironically, though the film was
hailed in the U.S. as a breakthrough for Asian characters and Asian actors, it
was criticized in Singapore for making it look as if virtually the whole Singaporean
population is Chinese — and it was criticized by Chinese because, though all
the actors were Asian, most of them weren’t actually Chinese) for the upcoming
wedding of his best friend from boyhood. The film’s conceit is that Rachel has
had no idea how rich Nick and his
family are until she agrees to join him on his trip there — and when she gets
on the plane (flown by a fictitious “Pacific Asian Airways” after the real
Singapore airline refused permission) they’re ushered into a fully appointed ultra-luxury
first-class suite (on an airplane!)
complete with a full-sized bed in case they want to make love on the way.
Rachel’s experience with Nick’s family is like culture shock on steroids; they
live in a lavishly appointed house (including one interior that was so
beautifully decorated in salmon and turquoise I was immediately reminded of
two-strip Technicolor) and they’re so determined to maintain the tradition and
standing of their family that they go out of their way to make Rachel feel
uncomfortable. The most formidable members of the Young family are Nick’s mom
Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) and her
mother, both of whom tell Rachel in no uncertain terms at the end that she’s
simply not good enough for their son and the elaborate family tradition he’s expected
to maintain when he takes over the family’s far-flung business from his dad,
who’s still alive but is constantly off on “business trips” and therefore is
never seen in the film.
Both the men and the women in the Youngs’ entourage
have pre-wedding parties, but the bachelor party for Nick’s friend, groom-to-be
Colin Khoo (Nick Pang), is held on an ocean liner they’ve chartered for the
purpose, anchoring it offshore and flying the guests in by helicopter, while
the party for the bride and her
friends is held on an entire island they’ve rented for it, called Samsara after
the limbo in Buddhist belief in which souls are stuck after death if they were
too obsessed with material things in life. Once there Rachel is snubbed by all
the rich girls, and their campaign against her reaches its climax when one or
more of the guests cut up a large fish and deposit the bloody corpse in her
bed, using the fish’s blood to write on her walls, “Catch this, you
gold-digging bitch.” (I guess at least one of the writers involved had seen The
Godfather.) Rachel’s only friend besides
Nick is an oddball character named Peik Lin Go, played by someone or something
named “Awkwafina” who appeared recently on Stephen Colbert’s show; this
character is a no-B.S. truth-teller whose function is to give Rachel good
advice and keep the Youngs’ crazy richness in perspective for her. The actual
wedding is even more over-the-top than these preliminaries; it’s held in a
church in which the walkway on which the groom and bride travel is flooded (Charles
said that this in itself was a statement of how ridiculously rich these people
are that they could do something that would ruin all their shoes, and I
wondered if they’d rehearsed this particular piece of the ceremony) and they
literally have to walk through the ornate puddle. Rachel appears in a stunning
dress fit for a princess (and picked out for her by a stereotypically Gay
character in the Young family who rubbed me the wrong way) and actually sits next to a real-life
princess (played by Kris Aquino, whose grandmother and father were both
presidents of the Philippines) and makes a great impression, but is later told
by Eleanor and her mom that they’ve hired a private detective who’s found out
some dirt on her. Apparently Rachel’s mother had an affair when she was still
living in China and it was her lover, not her husband, who was Rachel’s
biological dad — and that was why
Rachel’s mom suddenly fled to the U.S. and had and raised her daughter there.
Rachel had just assumed all these years that her father was dead, so all this
dirt on her past is totally new to her. She determines to walk out on Nick and
his crazy rich family, and even turns Nick down when he offers to marry her
whether her family accepts him or not (like a lot of 1930’s screwball
characters, he’s at least somewhat willing to accept disinheritance if that’s
what it will take to be with the person he loves), only he gets on the plane on
which she’s flying back to New York (on which she’s booked normal
accommodations in what’s quite obviously a deliberate contrast to the flight
she had going there) and proposes to her, and she accepts. The film ends with
an ambiguous close-up of Eleanor suggesting that she’s going to accept Rachel
as her daughter-in-law after all, and there’s a clever sequence cut into the
credits. There’s also a nice parallel in that the plot revolves around three couples — Nick and Rachel, who aren’t married (at
least not yet!); Colin and his fiancée, who are getting married; and Nick’s sister Astrid (Gemma Chan) who
married someone without money and who, in yet another typical 1930’s film
situation transposed to the modern day in this film, has essentially
“de-balled” him; he’s drifted into an affair because he feels so inadequate
because his wife is super-rich and he isn’t, and at the end she divorces him
and tells him she will decide
whether and when he gets to see their son. Crazy Rich Asians is the sort of movie they supposedly don’t make
anymore, and aside from challenging the (white American) audience’s stereotypes
of what Asians are like and how they live, it’s the sort of modern movie that I
like because it’s so much like a
1930’s movie and it illustrates that, regardless of race, culture or income,
people are pretty much the same everywhere and the only real difference between
rich and poor is that the more money you have, the more bizarre problems you
can create for yourselves.
