When Meeting Her Boyfriend’s Family, a Woman Becomes an Outsider Within Her Culture

From left: Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding, and Constance Wu
in "Crazy Rich Asians"
Photo Credit: Imdb.com

Director Jon M. Chu’s film, “Crazy Rich Asians,” which is based on Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel, opens with a quote from Napoléon Bonaparte that reads, “China is a sleeping giant.  Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world.”  Well, it looks like that quote now applies to the romantic-comedy genre, as Chu’s latest film offers said genre an opportunity to tell a love story within the Chinese culture, with plenty of fine performance and visual splendor to spare.

Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is an economics professor at New York University, whose boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), invites her to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding.  It isn’t until they get on the plane that Nick reveals to Rachel that he comes from a family of wealthy real estate tycoons.  While Rachel’s nervous about meeting Nick’s relatives, she’s determined to make the best of it.  However, when Nick’s mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), expresses disapproval of Rachel, the latter will begin to wonder if she will ever fit into the family.

Wu offers a delightful performance that captures the excitement and anxiety of meeting new people in a whole new world.  She displays the friendliness of her character as Rachel’s introduced to Nick’s family, but also carries a hint of self-doubt as she’s exposed to a lifestyle in which she never imagined herself, not knowing whether or not she will be accepted.  Using an abundance of wit and emotion, Wu presents a character that engages us in Rachel’s journey as she tries to prove to Nick’s kin that she’s more than an outsider, but an individual who understands how important family and culture mean to them.

Wu and Golding have a strong chemistry throughout the film that helps you care about the obstacles that they have to face, and they have a love that has you know that they can overcome any challenge that may impede them from the happiness that they seek.  This is an on-screen bond that helps make the story as endearing as it is.

Yeoh gives a wonderful performance as Nick’s demanding mother.  However, the iciness in her character isn’t a caricature of a mother who frowns upon her potential daughter-in-law, but she has her own motivations as to why she doesn’t think that Rachel is an acceptable companion for Nick.  There’s an important scene that Yeoh shares with Wu a little more than halfway through the film, and it’s here where we have a heartbreaking view into what has shaped Eleanor’s perception of Rachel, and Yeoh manages to bring tension with her character’s sternness and upper-class sense of composure, which are factors that Yeoh uses to take charge of every scene in which she appears.

Aside from Yeoh, the film has many other memorable supporting performances, two of which are Awkwafina as Goh Peik Lin, Rachel’s comical and lovable best friend from college; and Gemma Chan as Nick’s cousin Astrid Leong-Teo, a character who never fails to light up the screen with her radiant kindheartedness.  With this film having as big of a cast as it does, you think of the quote from Lorraine Bracco’s Karen Hill during her and Henry Hill’s wedding in “Goodfellas” when she narrates, “By the time I finished meeting everybody, I thought I was drunk.”  That’s a positive thing because it allows you to experience what Rachel’s feeling as she works to keep up with meeting Nick’s many friends and relatives.

While the screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim carries a few genre clichés, the details with which the film explores the characters’ relationships and their culture make up for it.  Other than the main plot about Rachel trying to find approval from Nick’s family, the narrative also features a subplot that has a similar theme for another set of characters, and this enriches the story’s theme about family and gives depth to some supporting characters in a film that has a lot of them.  And, in regard to the story’s display of Chinese culture, we’re given a thorough view into how it shapes the lives of the characters. 

Chu’s direction offers much that sweeps you away into the film’s Singaporean backdrop.  You have Vanja Cernjul’s cinematography that captures the beauty of the film’s locations; Mary E. Vogt’s gorgeous costumes; art direction from Leslie Ewe, David Ingram, and Gary Mackay; and set decoration from Andrew Baseman.  With these factors, this film has some of the finest visual styling that I’ve ever seen in a romantic-comedy.  If you feel like that films of this genre don’t seem like they need to be seen on a big screen, I assure you that the visual beauty of this film makes it worth experiencing in a theater.

The scene that utilizes the camerawork, costumes, and sets to the best possible degree is the sequence with Nick’s friend’s wedding.  Between the gorgeous details of those aspects and a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” from Japanese-American singer and YouTuber Kina Grannis, you have a scene that’s so abundant in romance that it may become your favorite part of the film.  I know that it did for me, and this scene alone gives me the incentive to see this movie again.

While romantic-comedies have reached some low points throughout the years by telling the same narrative over and over again, “Crazy Rich Asians” shows that if there are opportunities for this genre to tell stories from new perspectives, then this genre will be here to stay.

Grade: A-