In a world awash with food, entertainment, travel options, who do you trust for recommendations? There used to be a food critic, a TV or movie reviewer in your daily paper. You might not have agreed with his or her every judgement, but you knew their foibles and biases so knew how many grains of salt to apply to their calls. No longer.
First, what’s a daily newspaper? Second, reviewers and critics twenty, thirty or forty years younger than me have different tastes and often seem unfamiliar with anything earlier in the history of the world than 2000. It makes them likely to overrate the latest flash in the pan. Even worse is the crowdsourced sites that rely on aggregating a bunch of opinions. Rather than Siskel and Ebert giving thumbs up or down, we get an average of the unnamed. This leads to weird results. A poor review of a French restaurant, for instance, because the food hd weird sauces.
Case in point, “Crazy Rich Asians.” Reviews for this adaptation of a best seller have been almost universally rapturous. It has been called a return to the classic rom coms of yesteryear and even a modern version of the screwball comedy. It has achieved a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93, which is probably higher than “Citizen Kane,” and a 74 Metacritic score with only one negative review out of 43. Well, make that two put of 44. I know because I took their advice and have lived to repent.
It first needs to be noted that review averages on Yelp, Trip Advisor or Rotten Tomatoes seem to suffer from grade inflation. The normal distribution of very few As and Fs and a whole lot of Cs doesn’t seem to apply. And, in the case of “Crazy Rich Asians,” another factor may be at work. Many of the reviews seem more interested in political correctness than critical acuity.
It appears to have been obligatory to applaud “Crazy Rich” for being the first big budget, major studio film with an all-Asian cast since “The Joy Luck Club” in 1993. One gushing piece in Vanity Fair by Wesley Yang quotes unnamed New Yorkers saying, “I cried just seeing Asians on the screen.”
Well, I wanted to cry having been encouraged to plunk down hard-earned dollars for “Crazy Rich Asians” when it turned out to be saddled with a plot lacking in suspense, plausibility, serious or comical conflict or cleverness. Add to that a pair of co-stars, Constance Wu and Henry Golding, that are bland individually and without the necessary chemistry as a couple.
The film has Asians, and they are rich, gaudily, repulsively so, but the only crazy is in the supporting characters who overdo the screwball, perhaps to compensate for the vacuum at the film’s heart. The classic screwball comedies had plenty of funny supporting players (Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, Walter Connolly, Mischa Auer, Kenneth Mars, Tony Randall, Charles Coburn, Charlie Ruggles) but they also had a role in advancing the plot. Awkwafina, Ken Jeong and Jimmy O. Yang just do shtick while we gaze at Singapore luxury and wait for the plot to stop idling.
To put this film in the same breath with the classics of the genre shows a lack of discrimination that ought to be essential equipment for a critic. I adore the great screwball comedies and this is no “My Man Godfrey,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Lady Eve,” “It Happened One Night,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” “Ball of Fire,” “Nothing Sacred,” “His Girl Friday,” or “Twentieth Century.” They raced by in an allegro 77 to 102 minutes. “Crazy Rich Asians” plods tediously for 120 soporific minutes.
Nor is it up to latter day entrants like the best of the Doris Day films, (those with Rock Hudson or James Garner, like “Send Me No Flowers,”) “When Harry Met Sally,” Notting Hill,” “French Kiss, “What’s Up, Doc,” “Moonstruck,” “Born Yesterday” or “Silver Linings Playbook.” The film is undermined not only by the blandness of the leads but by the fact that they lack the dizzy, odd couple, yin and yang, back and forth, love-hate pioneered by the relationship of Kate and Petruchio. Such prickly tension characterizes almost all of the great rom com relationships — Clark and Claudette, Cooper or Fonda with Stanwyck, Lombard with Powell or Barrymore, Cary with Kate or Rosalind or Loy or Dunne or Sheridan or anybody.
This film concerns not sweet and sour or leather and lace but nice and nicer. And the reason the course of true love doesn’t run smooth isn’t their volatility but their docility. The groom’s mom and grandma disapprove of the prospective bride. Rachel is not one of them — not rich, not Asian-Asian but Asian-American, not steeped in tradition but modern, not subservient but liberated.
Sociologically interesting, dramatically less so, especially since we know the couple will get together, though how is not clear since they both seem too meek to stick up for themselves. And the conflict arrives so late in the show that the obligatory unknotting of it then seems like a hasty afterthought. The film is all wealth porn, minimal build-up and no payoff.
Which brings us to the real problem. Comedy is hard, and a specialized skill. The script doesn’t understand the complex architecture of a set-up and pay-off, the split-second timing that comedy requires. The director, Jon Chu, may know his way around a camera, but nothing about his previous work — “GI Joe,” “Justin Bieber’s Believe,” “Jem and the Holograms” or “Now You See Me 2” suggests he knows his way around a comedy, farce, or rom com.
The great film comedies were made by experts in the form, Hawks, Wilder, Capra, Sturges, Jewison, Reiner, Allen. And many of them featured actors who also had a feel for comedy. They may not have been the biggest stars, but they were consummate pros in this genre. They knew what the pompous Freudian analyst told Kate Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, “The love impulse very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” And they knew how to make that hilarious. This film knows how to make crazy rich Asians look glamorously well-dressed, but neither romantic nor comic.