Reigniting the Rom-Com: Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Historically, I do not enjoy romantic comedies. I am a horror buff, I love thrillers, I enjoy action comedies and cars exploding, I can tell you every detail of every Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen travel movie, but as soon as romance gets in there on a serious level I tend to stop enjoying things. I'm a bitter weirdo who hates love! You have to throw in something campy for me to get on board, or at least make it queer. All that considered, I don't think anyone would be surprised that I deeply enjoyed Crazy Rich Asians. Like Get Out and Girls Trip and Moonlight and a whole host of other movies, it didn't matter at all whether or not I loved Crazy Rich Asians, because it is not about me. Not every movie needs to be about me. There were a lot of things in this movie that were not for me, and I loved that.

The movie is based on Kevin Kwan's book of the same name, and it follows the story of an economics professor named Rachel (Constance Wu, who is outstanding) whose boyfriend (Henry Golding) invites her to Singapore for a wedding and to meet his very intense, very rich family. John M. Chu directs, and you can see his experience with music movies - the Step Up movies, Justin Bieber's concert movie - in the slickness and speed of the way the movie is shot and cut. Visually, it's a treat. There are times where it does feel a little bit like you are watching an advertisement for different businesses in Singapore, but this is a movie about the excesses of capitalism and wealth and new vs. old money, so it vaguely makes sense. That said, I could have done less with slightly less shots off the delights offered to you by Raffles. We get it, Raffles. 

It's easy to get wrapped up in Crazy Rich Asians. The cast of characters are presented at first as a series of flat caricatures, but most of them are given rich storylines that are easy to latch on to and swing between in the same spirit as a social climber. It's aided by characters like the ones played by Awkwafina, who's Peik Lin joins Rachel as a different type of audience surrogate - the id to her ego, perhaps. If you do lose yourself in it, you're lost with beautiful clothes and amazing venues and wonderful music and the highlights of Singapore. It retains heart throughout, but it knows what it is and that you're there for love and fun and low stakes drama. It also doesn't try to make all of its jokes that will make white audiences, and rather for the people in the movie and the people the movie will mean more to.

This movie is not likeable because of its success as a major US vehicle with a predominantly Asian or Asian American cast, but regardless of that. It's an added bonus that it's well shot and gave me warm fuzzy feelings. 

It is not without fault, and the faults are ones I feel lie in the process of adaptation and in the aforementioned advertisement. Anything shot on a plane had me veering into eye-roll territory, as did all of the scenes that took place in miscellaneous Raffles hotel locations (why are they having a heart to heart in the Raffles reception area?). The main issue I personally am placing to the adaptation is the compacting and short-changing of a bunch of different storylines. While I loved that a lot of the secondary characters were given full lives and dimension,  some of the ways that their stories intersected and were tied up felt strangely punctuated and poorly translated. 

None of that really diminished my enjoyment of the movie. I had a great time, and I got wrapped up in the way I tend to do with so few heteo romances. It had that fun, magical, fairytale quality that I wanted to get swept up in. Of course there were things I might have wanted more nuance in, particularly with how the queer coded character was represented, but on the whole, I walked out of Crazy Rich Asians with a smile that was hard to wipe off my face.

Rating: 7/10 - It would have been a 9/10 with a little more nuance and a couple of tighter edits, but there was very little else I could take issue with.