The phrase “romantic comedy” usually makes me gag a little. These films tend to be too upbeat and vapid to be considered “romance.” They also tend to fail as comedies, because they’re far too concerned with hitting just the right beats to follow that lucrative formula so many financially successful films have been bound to for ages.
That’s right, I’m talking about you Gigli. Wipe that smirk off your face.
I know I sound like a gigantic Grinch when I broach the topic of RomComs, but I am certainly not the intended demographic. As a male, I’m even expected to hate these films for being too feminine, and still, I’m a huge fan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I enjoyed Easy A, and I’ve seen Heathers more times that I care to admit. I am not closed off to femininity in film, and yet when I complain about how asinine movies like Mama Mia! are, I still get the response, “You just don’t get it because you’re a guy.” Well, perhaps most people just don’t understand manipulatively manufactured entertainment.
On the other end of the spectrum we have action films. These include the Transformers franchise, superhero movies, war films, and whatever gritty, trendy action film is lined up for the summer. As a male audience member, giant humanoid car-hybrids are supposed to cater to my interests, powerful superheroes need to fulfill my masculine power-trip fantasies, war films must foster my patriotic nature, and explosions should in theory make my dick really, really hard. By marketing standards, I am a statistical anomaly. I have no interest in automobiles of any kind, I don’t need to live vicariously through Superman to feel good about myself, and explosions do nothing for me sexually (We’re on to your fetishes, Michael Bay.) I know it’s terribly passé to mention Bay’s work in this argument, but he’s just such an easy target.
From a marketing perspective, these two extremes have traditionally resulted in moderately reliable box office returns, and so their tried and true formulas are recycled again and again. As a result, unless a RomCom has something exceptional to offer, these movies fail to hold up when deconstructed. There are so many tropes and recurring plot points that exist in nearly every film of this kind, and the degree to which these become repetitive and tiresome is likely directly related to how many of them you’ve seen.
They also begin to feel egregiously cynical when traditional criticism is applied. Nobody wants to feel marketed to; we want the illusion of free will. Once this strategy is demystified, we tend to react very strongly because either we feel duped and manipulated, or we wish to protect ourselves from entertaining the potentially-embarrassing possibility that we just paid to have our preferences and even sexuality exploited for two hours.
In all actuality, this is simply how the film industry works. It is just that: an industry. Few writers begin a script with, “How can I reach the widest audience possible?” at the forefront of their minds. It’s not always the artist’s job to ask this question, but in a competitive market where we as the consumer have fairly low yet narrow standards, you can’t blame a marketing team for asking this question.
What really makes RomComs so exceptional is not that they’re marketed almost exclusively to a very targeted demographic, but that they tend to follow a very, very strict algorithm. A romance blossoms, usually with some conflict between the romantic leads, things get hot and heavy, the aforementioned conflict leads to a third-act break-up, and the film ends with the leads reconciling. I can only watch that story-line unfold so many times before it becomes a bit stale. Still, it’s a solid basic structure, and there’s plenty of room in the genre for nuance. A film that sticks to this formula isn’t necessarily bad, but the ones that do usually fail in the execution department.
2018’s Crazy Rich Asians is definitely a RomCom in every sense, but it’s the quality of the execution that makes it shockingly accessible and fresh. The Asian cultural aspects it delves into are moderately rare, and that unique perspective really adds to the film. It’s strange to think that a formulaic RomCom may be one of my favorites of the year, but Crazy Rich Asians brings so much to the table.
The film concerns a young Asian woman, Rachel Chu, who travels to Singapore for a wedding, and to meet her boyfriend’s family. In order to ward off the gold-diggers, her boyfriend Nick has concealed his identity as a member of one of Singapore’s most affluent families. Rachel is shocked to learn of this, and she’s forced to deal with the pressures of Nick’s wealthy family, placing her behavior under a microscope. Each family member reacts to Rachel’s presence quite differently, and this contributes to the cultural nuances on display.
Nearly all of the characters in the film have interesting and relatable arcs, most of which have to do with how their opinion of Rachel evolves throughout, and most of them are notably memorable. There are a few sub-plots, particularly the one regarding Nick’s suspiciously-perfect sister, that do tend to meander away from the primary conflict without ever resolving in a way that serves the primary plot, but even these are entertaining enough that all is forgiven.
On a technical level, Crazy Rich Asians really shines, and that’s rather rare for a RomCom. The pacing of the film is just right, and while it’s two hours long, it flows well enough that this run-time doesn’t feel excessive, another occasional RomCom sin. In part because the film is mostly set in gorgeous, up-scale areas of Singapore, the sets are stunning throughout. It’s full of garish mansions with a bright, varied color palette, and it’s a beautiful film to look at. The cinematography is competent enough to really highlight these locales, and the setting is almost surreal, reflecting the main character’s awe of this new world.
To me, the most shocking aspect of the film was its creative editing. There’s a sequence early on in the film where a woman spots Nick with Rachel at a coffee shop, and to demonstrate the absurdity of the scrutiny Nick is under, we see every link in the chain of how the information that Nick is dating a “commoner” spreads to his family. It’s a fun scene, and it’s handled with care and creativity. It’s obviously not the first montage of its kind on film, but it’s a good example of the abnormal amount of thought put into nearly every scene.
There is only one major plot point that heavily disappointed me, and it’s a spoiler, so skip the following two paragraph if you care.
Toward the end, we get a really typical RomCom third-act break-up. Rachel decides to return to America without Nick, who feels an obligation to stay in Singapore. Rachel, a character who has up to this point become a stronger person as a result of the trials she’s faced with the family, is reduced to a morose, love-sick stereotype. Nick makes a grand gesture on an airplane, and the two are back together.
This part of the film feels a bit disconnected and abrupt, in part because it did such a great job of creating a compelling conflict that could have easily been resolved without resorting to this particular cliché. At the same time, Crazy Rich Asians is based on a novel, so unless this is a deviation from the book, I can’t really judge the film too harshly for this choice. It’s just disappointing to see all that forward momentum get derailed for about fifteen minutes before the film resolves in a relatively satisfying way.
End of spoilers
In a world of formulaic romantic comedies with little to offer aesthetically or artistically, Crazy Rich Asians is a huge anomaly. It still follows the RomCom formula, but it’s creative enough to completely blow my rock-bottom expectations out of the water. It’s difficult to say if the film would be such a surprisingly enjoyable experience in the absence of an over-saturated market of RomComs that amount to polished turds, but it’s so much fun to watch that I don’t feel compelled to explore that alternate scenario.
I’d highly recommend Crazy Rich Asians to anyone who’s as sick and tired as I am of this sub-genre of film, but I can safely endorse this for the rest of the movie-going population, because of its astonishingly broad appeal.
8.5/10