‘Crazy Rich Asians’ review: Asian outside, white inside

“You’re like a banana,” says Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina), while consoling her friend, Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” It’s an analogy that can conveniently be stretched to describe Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians — an archetypal Hollywood romcom packaged with Asian casting and locales, and a bewildering farrago of cultures.

Almost like a fairy tale, in which a plain-Jane falls in love with a Singaporean lad, who turns out to an unassuming heir to a massive real estate empire (“I didn’t know you were wealthy, you use my Netflix account”), it plays on our fetish for the “crazy rich”, more than the Asian-ness of the narrative. It’s fine for a crowd-pleaser romantic comedy to do that, but the very marketability of this film rests heavily on ‘groundbreaking’ representation, hence the narrative is expected to go beyond the superficial casting and setting. Unfortunately, neither the humour nor the drama has cultural punch. What makes it enjoyable ultimately is the tried-and-tested sugary fluff, wildly good-looking people with chiselled bodies, glossy visuals and Awkwafina’s one-liners.

Based on Kevin Kwan’s novel of the same name, the opposition to love comes primarily from the hero, Nick Young’s (Henry Golding) mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), who is classist and xenophobic. For her, Americans put individuality, ambition and passion over family, traditions and community. As Rachel enters this world, the film takes some jibes on opulence (“No one loves free stuff more than the rich”) and the rather extra life they live. But it fails to evoke humour that would arise from a middle-class New York-bred Chinese professor entering an unexpectedly loaded Singaporean household. The affluence and its rare criticism, instead, are so generic that there appears to be no distinction between the crème de la crème of wealthy families worldwide — they are all vain and shallow (“This gold decor was inspired by Trump’s washroom”). The “representation of minority in Hollywood” therefore appears to be of the handful of rich folks and their capitalist culture, rather than Asians.

White people in Crazy Rich Asians can hardly be seen or heard, and some appear as skimpily dressed waiters and dancers at a bachelor’s and bachelorette parties, which is a payback for all the times Hollywood reduced Asian faces to background props. But these are small joys in what could have been an outlandish display of impudence that does not rest heavy on palatability, hiding behind the excuse of being foremost a romcom.

At the start of Crazy Rich Asians, Napoleon Bonaparte’s words flash on the screen: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes up, she will shake the world”. The film might have set out to act against the French statesman’s warning, but it ends up trapped in the same haughtiness that permeates his words.