Film Review: Crazy Rich Asians
I really wanted to love Crazy Rich Asians (Chu 2018), and it was with great anticipation that I took my seat at the theatre and settled in.
The production values here are lush and the sets dazzling, which only serves to showcase the flat blandness of the characters and overly-simplistic story. From leading man Henry Golding as Nick, to supporting quirky best-friend Peik Lin, played by Awkwafina, the film is populated with a flaccid and one-dimensional characters who do little to engage, but are provided as handsome and malleable mannequins to push forward a narrative devoid of any real tension.
No amount of air/con could justify all these clothes. Paging Imelda Marcos...
The interracial kiss between Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton, seen through the 'white gaze' in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
In film theory we study the phenomenon of the Super Tom, (and I'm shamelessly paraphrasing here) defined as an object created to satisfy white audience members that must fulfill contrasting needs: the Super Tom is basically a super hero — super-handsome, super-smart, super-confident, and super-attractive to act as the 'Other' but to gain acceptance by the white audience.* Think Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (Kramer 1967), the classic example. Henry Golding's Nick is a Super Tom. He is flawless (except maybe for being a Mama's boy) and is therefore, not only boring, but a misrepresentation of his race (races here, as he is Eurasian). The villainy of the Super Tom is that is doesn't allow space for flaws and therefore humaness.
These characters do little to subvert, and everything to support, the idea of Sillypore— a superficial, gilded playground. The Singapore I know, with all it's varied layers of cultural strata, is reduced to spectacle and frankly it rankles more than a little. Between the glimpses of Singapore and the lovely Nonya settings in Malaysia, I was in a state of constant (albeit low-grade) cringe, more embarrassed than impressed. More scenes representing Singapore as Asian and not just Crazy and Rich (like the one in the hawker centre at Newton Circus (where I would walk Blue in the mornings when it was closed) would have remedied the representation of the characters and locale as shallow and superficial.
And now here's a surprise...
Hooray! I didn't like it, but I'm still thrilled Crazy Rich Asians was made (and in Hollywood no less!) and I hope to see more films which represent and celebrate ethnic diversity made by big studios. How can I have such conflicting viewpoints? Because I'm human, and that's what humans do — and that's what films should do too.
•Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. By Hernan Vera, Andrew Gordon
