Only Moderately Crazy About "Crazy Rich Asians" (Again)

Hi everyone,

We're back with another review of a rewatched movie, but this time I actually remembered watching the movie the first time!

Let's talk about "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018)!

I wanted to rewatch this movie because I recently devoured the book on which it is based and am almost done with the second in Kevin Kwan's three-part series.  I remembered reasonably enjoying the movie when I saw it in theaters, and was excited to rewatch it with the greater familiarity conferred by reading its source material.

Upon rewatching the film, my feelings are mixed.  On one hand, "Crazy Rich Asians" is a gluttonous visual feast befitting its title: it is a bananas explosion of all of the glitz and indulgence that inordinate amounts of wealth could make possible.  The movie also benefits from its extremely likable leads, Constance Wu (as Rachel) and Henry Golding (as Nick).  There are many silly and enjoyable moments, as well as some genuinely moving ones.  

I was particularly struck by the pivotal moment of the wedding of Araminta Lee (played by Sonoya Mizuno) and Colin Khoo (played by Chris Pang), despite its significant alteration from how it was described in the book.  Instead of suspended trees and bridesmaids holding arches of blossoming cherry tree branches, Araminta and Colin's wedding procession is transformed into a firefly-filled rice paddy through which the bride, dressed to evoke a glittering crane, elegantly strides down a watery aisle to her future husband.  Although this diverges from the book, it is successful in conveying both an ostentatious display of wealth and stagecraft, but also an arrestingly beautiful and emotionally evocative reveal of bride to groom that prompts a fleeting but crucial expression of love between our heroes.  The difference between film and novel in this instance is therefore pretty immaterial.

That said, I found that "Crazy Rich Asians" suffers from some notable weaknesses.

The casting feels surprisingly uneven.  As members of the Goh family, Ken Jeong and Awkwafina (not to mention Jimmy O. Yang as the excruciatingly over-indulged Bernard Tai) are predictably over-the-top in ways that are at turns goofy and cringey.  Alternatively, Michelle Yeoh lends Nick's mother Eleanor hefty gravitas, and Gemma Chan is so poised as Nick's cousin Astrid as to be almost robotic.  It feels like these characters don't belong in the same movie together, and it places a lot of pressure on Wu and Golding to be the natural, normal-seeming people trying to hold its center between such stylistically opposing poles.

I also hate to perpetrate the cliché of complaining that the movie isn't as good as the book, but the movie isn't as good as the book!  Given its decently long runtime of two hours, I was surprised at how much of the storyline the film flattened, simplified, changed frustratingly (why is Alistair an asshole now??), or discarded altogether.  I'm particularly surprised by the alterations made to the conflict between Rachel and Eleanor, including the odd choice to have Eleanor signal her full support of Nick and Rachel's engagement by the end of the movie when that is not remotely what happens in the first book in the series--in fact, it carries over into and drives the drama in the first part of the next installment.  With a movie version of the second book supposedly in the works (yay!), I am so perplexed as to why the filmmakers painted themselves into the odd and unnecessary corner of resolving a central and ongoing tension in the first film installment.

All that said, I am loath to overly criticize a movie that is the first modern story with an all-Asian cast in a quarter century.  The above critiques aside, this is an incredibly watchable and fun film--as evidenced by the fact that I've now watched it twice.

And about that: It was interesting to watch "Crazy Rich Asians" again and then revisit my previous rating of the film.  I at least somewhat expected that my rating would change somewhat given that I'd seen it already and would certainly experience it differently having read the book.

But just like last time, I gave the movie a 3.

And seriously, read the book!

{Heart}