Format: Various media on rockin’ flatscreen.
My viewing of Crazy Rich Asians took a week. It’s not the fault of the movie itself. Sue and I watched about half of it a week ago, but she started to fall asleep, and it took us a week to both have the opportunity to finish it up. This is a movie I’d heard a great deal about, so I was interested to see it. Now that I have, I’m a bit torn. I get that it’s a good movie, and I certainly understand the wealth porn aspects of it. What I don’t understand is that no one else seems to see that this is really a very standard rom-com in a lot of ways. On to the plot—Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is an economics professor at NYU and is successful by all standards of American society. Her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), needs to return home to Singapore for the wedding of his best friend, and naturally Rachel is going to come along as his plus-one. Nick has kept a great deal of his family history a secret from Rachel, telling her only that the family is comfortable. Rachel is excited to go, for the wedding itself, to meet Nick’s family, and because her college roommate Peik Lin (Nora Lum using her stage name Awkwafina) lives in Singapore.
It’s not until Rachel visits Peik Lin that she discovers just how “comfortable” Nick’s family is. The Youngs own a substantial amount of real estate in Singapore, one of the most expensive cities in the world. The Youngs aren’t comfortable; they are wealthy beyond all measure, and virtually everyone Nick knows comes from that sort of money. How rich are they? In the opening scene, when Nick’s family is denied a room at an exclusive London hotel, they buy the hotel.
What happens is exactly what you think is going to happen. Rachel arrives, has a few minor embarrassing moments with Nick’s family, and has exactly the sorts of problems you assume she will. Nick’s ex-girlfriend (Jing Lusi) makes her as uncomfortable as possible, many assume she may be a gold digger, and it’s soon clear that Nick’s mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) is not a member of Team Rachel for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that, as an American, Rachel is more concerned with her own happiness than with anything else. That she was raised by a single mother is merely additional cause for alarm in the Young family.
Here’s the thing: Crazy Rich Asians is a good rom-com, but it’s not good specifically because of the story. In fact, the story is really nothing that special. Oh, the people involved are rich to a staggering degree, so there is the pure, ridiculous, screaming money aspect of the film. The cast is very good, and the parts are played perfectly. This is why Crazy Rich Asians works, because the story itself? It’s not that hard to see where things are going, because you’ve likely already seen this. If this is the Nordstrom’s version of the story, pretty much everyone has seen the Target or K-Mart version. There’s only one place this is going to go, and it goes there with all speed.
And that’s the biggest problem here. There is absolutely nothing in Crazy Rich Asians that I haven’t seen a dozen times over outside of the soul-crushing wealth. Nick is too perfect to be anything but a movie character, for instance. We know that his mother is going to hate his girlfriend because that is exactly the sort of tension we expect in a romantic comedy. If his mother and future wife actually got along, where would the drama be? I hate to say this for a movie that is as nicely cast and acted as this one, but there’s a hell of a lot of things being telegraphed here, and that’s a little disappointing.
We live in a world where, even a few years ago, a film like Crazy Rich Asians, a movie made by an American film company with an Asian director and cast, would probably not have been possible or at least extremely unlikely. That it exists is a good thing; it shows that there’s progress of a kind. We can have a major movie release where literally the entire cast is non-white. That’s a good thing. This is probably also the reason that story here is one that is so much a standard of the genre.
The truth is that I wanted to like this more than I did. You’ve seen a version of this if you’ve seen Coming to America or Pretty Woman or Sabrina or Arthur or about a dozen other films. The rich guy/poor girl plot is common enough to be a veritable subgenre of rom-coms. And so, for as much as I enjoyed this, I feel like I’ve seen it before. Even the stand-out characters, Peik Lin and Oliver (Nico Santos), the gay cousin, are the sassy characters you knew for a fact would be here.
Why to watch Crazy Rich Asians: It’s classy wealth porn.
Why not to watch: This is a surprisingly standard rom-com based in Singapore.
