GoldOpen

I finally saw Crazy Rich Asians on Saturday. I've never read the book, so everything was new to me. I loved Constance Wu and the whole cast. Michelle Yeoh plays Nick's mother Eleanor, and starting from the first scene in London, she does get some depth and complexity beyond being a villain. Eleanor gave up her career as a lawyer to marry into the Young family, but even after all these years she never seems to satisfy her mother-in-law (even though she gave her son to Ah-Ma to raise). You'd think that would give her some sympathy for Rachel wanting to still have her career, but no, Eleanor's sacrifices mean nothing if she thinks that Rachel wouldn't make the same sacrifice for Nick. (It does rather remind me of Victorian romance novels; I recently watched an Edith Wharton adaptation where an old matriarch resents the younger generation of women shirking their responsibilities and not sacrificing like they were expected to.)

So that, along with tensions about class and cultural differences, provide lots of conflict among the characters. But there's also plenty of romance and humor. The soundtrack is gorgeous, and I recognized some of the songs right away, but it took me much longer to recognize Coldplay's "Yellow" when sung in Mandarin. Very beautiful cover, and I've since read some articles about the director loving that song, as a way to reclaim pride in his Asian identity. It's strange because I never associated that song with my being Asian, because I always misheard the lyrics. The lines where he sings about "your skin and bones" I've always heard as, "You're still, yeah you're still the one" or "you're still the force" as in a celestial force like the stars he keeps singing about. It never occurred to me that he was talking about her "skin and bones" because frankly that's a weird, somewhat creepy way to describe someone you love. I wonder how literal the Chinese translation is.

There's a lot of opulence on display in the film, but money doesn't always buy taste, because Rachel's college friend lives in a family mansion decorated like Trump's bathroom, and there's one guy Bernard whose shirt is always open, and he throws a tacky bachelor party on the ocean. The $40 million dollar wedding is so over-the-top, and I'm sorry but I do agree that decorating the church like a rice paddy was tacky as hell. (If you want an outdoor wedding, then make it outdoors!) Flooding the walkway for the bride might be an impressive feat, but is she saying she doesn't give a fuck about ruining the church floor? Ruining her dress and all the bridesmaid dresses in the water? Fuck. Crazy rich indeed. Money doesn't buy happiness either, as we learn in Astrid's troubled marriage, but at least she has Rachel to confide in and finally finds her voice. I will say, though, that Rachel let Nick off the hook too easily about omitting the truth from her for a year and not preparing her for his family before the Singapore trip. Don't throw her into the lion's den without warning.

Anyway, I'm so glad the film did well at the box office, and that lots of people celebrated the diversity before and behind the screen. I hope there will be a sequel, and they continue to keep it in theaters, not on Netflix where they can hide viewing numbers. Gotta keep it up so it becomes normal business, not a fluke or a "hot trend" of the moment. Can't let Hollywood keep getting away with whitewashing or yellowface again.