It’s possible that no Hollywood romantic comedy has hit the big screen bearing more expectations than Crazy Rich Asians.
It’s the first contemporary English-language Hollywood movie with an almost all-Asian cast in a quarter-century (the last was 1993’s The Joy Luck Club). And in risk-averse Hollywood, that means the film’s reception has huge implications for Asian and Asian-American actors and filmmakers in all kinds of genres.
That’s a lot of pressure for any film, but especially a romantic comedy — a genre that’s been sidelined for the past decade and is still considered less artistically important than prestige dramas or big-budget action movies.
Thankfully, all that pressure has pressed this film into a diamond: The phrase Crazy Rich Asians fails to convey just how fun and sweet this film is. Perhaps a more appropriate, if prohibitively lengthy, title would be “The Best Movie About Asian People in Decades and the Best Rom-Com of the Summer.”
Crazy Rich Asians is a dazzling, sumptuous success. The movie triumphantly breathes new life into the Hollywood rom-com.
Crazy Rich Asians’ plot is a slimmed-down version of Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel of the same name (which birthed a trilogy — hello, future film sequels), though it still crams a lot into its two-hour runtime. As adapted by Peter Chiarelli (The Proposal) and TV writer Adele Lim, the screenplay draws on some of the most beloved tropes of the romantic comedy. It’s got hints of Cinderella, which has provided a partial template for many a rom-com (Pretty Woman, Ever After, The Prince and Me, even the pretty terrible but much-watched Netflix movie A Christmas Prince).
There are hints of the lineage of Jane Austen here too — especially stories like Pride and Prejudice and Emma, which explore class in the midst of a swoony, clever romance. And those pieces share DNA with movies like Pretty in Pink, in which the spunky, self-assured heroine finds her own way in the world, and finds love in the process.
The result is a thoroughly recognizable romantic comedy, with many of the same tropes that rom-coms have used for decades. And yet it feels fresh too, because the story at its center is foreign territory for Hollywood both literally and figuratively. Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a Chinese-American NYU economics professor, decides to spend spring break with her boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding), who’s going home to Singapore to be the best man in his friend’s wedding.
What Rachel doesn’t know is that Nick comes from a fabulously wealthy family, a thing she starts to realize when they’re ushered to their private suite on the airplane. But it soon becomes clear that his family and the social circle in which they move are far, far wealthier than anything she could have imagined.
Rachel was raised by a single mother who emigrated from mainland China to New York City, a far cry from the gilded, glitzy world Nick that brings her into. The Young family, which immigrated to Singapore from China centuries earlier, are “old money” rich, and basically own all the real estate on the island, as Rachel’s college roommate Peik Lin (Awkwafina) tells her. Their friends and relatives are all fabulously rich as well.
They’re also very close-knit. Nick has a couple of cousins with whom he’s friendly — uptight, image-obsessed business executive Eddie (Ronny Chieng) and movie director Alistair (Remy Hii) — but he’s closest to Astrid (Gemma Chan), who is richer than any of them by dint of parentage, and yet married Michael (Pierre Png), a self-described “commoner.” And though Nick is close to his mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), he grew up living with his grandmother (Lisa Lu) at her estate, for which the only word is “palatial.”
This excerpt originally appeared on https://www.vox.com Here
