Crazy Rich Asians: A Milestone and a Conventional Romantic Comedy
The first Hollywood studio film to put a majority Chinese cast at the center of a modern story since 1993 arrived on August 15, 2018, and Warner Bros. spent $30 million on it. Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians grossed more than $238 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2010s. The gross suggests audiences showed up. The film’s other arguments — about who gets to be Singaporean on screen, about whether representation and stereotype can share a frame — are still open.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Rachel Chu Lands in Singapore
The setup is a fairy tale with a credit score. Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) teaches economics at NYU. Her boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) asks her to fly to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding. He confesses on the plane that his family is wealthy. He insists they will love her. He is wrong about the second part.
What Nick leaves out is the scale. His family owns a real estate empire. In Singapore, they are effectively royalty. Rachel learns this not from Nick but from her old college roommate Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina), who explains the situation and then helps her pick a dress for dinner at the Young estate.
That dinner is the film’s hinge. Michelle Yeoh plays Eleanor Young, Nick’s mother, and she plays the scene quietly. Eleanor disapproves of Rachel’s Americanness — of a woman who puts her own passions ahead of family. The scene works because nobody says the ugly part out loud.
Eleanor Young, Astrid Leong-Teo, and the Family Rules
Eleanor quit law school to marry and raise a family. She tells Rachel this while showing her ring, and the information lands as both confession and warning. Rachel endears herself to the family matriarch, Shang Su Yi (Lisa Lu). Whether that buys her anything with Eleanor is another question, and the film’s answer reads as no.
The cousin who treats Rachel like a person is Astrid Leong-Teo (Gemma Chan), a fashion icon married to Michael Teo (Pierre Png), a former soldier from a modest background starting a tech company. Astrid discovers Michael is cheating. It is the film’s second story, and Chan plays it with a stillness that the rest of the movie rarely allows.
Then come the parties. At the bachelorette and bachelor events, Rachel and Nick are each warned that the Youngs will never accept her. Rachel returns to her hotel room to find a dead fish in her bed and a message calling her a gold digger. Astrid cleans it up and comforts her. Nick tells Colin Khoo (Chris Pang) about his plan to propose. Colin, happy for him, warns that marrying Rachel would expose her to attacks from Nick’s family and their community.
A Cast Built Before the Cameras Rolled
Chu had a “dream casting sheet” before a single role was confirmed: Wu, Yeoh, and Chan were on it, along with Ronny Chieng and Jimmy O. Yang. Golding was a newcomer when he won the male lead. Yeoh joined in March 2017. Ken Jeong signed on in May for a role involving less than a week of filming, and said of it: “It’s just something I wanted to be part of. It’s about wanting to be part of something monumental. Something that’s bigger than me. I’m so giddy I’m part of this, I can’t even tell you.”
Filming ran from April to June 2017 across Singapore, Malaysia, and New York City. The film premiered August 7, 2018, at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. It runs 121 minutes.
The supporting bench is deep: Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Lee, Lisa Lu as Ah Ma, Harry Shum Jr. as Charlie Wu, Nico Santos as Oliver T’sien, Ronny Chieng as Eddie Cheng, Jimmy O. Yang as Bernard Tai. Charlie Wu appears only in a mid-credits scene, and Chu has confirmed a sequel would focus more on him.
Two Kinds of Welcome
| Element | Rachel Chu’s reception | Astrid Leong-Teo’s marriage |
|---|---|---|
| Standing with the Youngs | Outsider, Chinese American, judged on family loyalty | Insider by blood, married beneath the family’s expectations |
| The threat | A dead fish and a note calling her a gold digger | Michael’s infidelity |
| Who helps | Peik Lin, then Astrid | No one in the family |
| What the film asks | Will the family accept her? | Why did she stay? |
The table is the film’s real structure, as this paper reads it. Rachel is attacked from outside the family. Astrid is eroded from inside it. Crazy Rich Asians treats the second as the more serious problem, even though it gives the first far more screen time.
What the Representation Argument Misses
The film drew praise in the United States for its Asian representation. It also drew criticism: for casting few actors from Singapore or Southeast Asia, or of fully ethnically Chinese heritage; for not fully portraying Singapore’s multiracial population; and, some said, for perpetuating stereotypes of East Asians.
Both things are true, and the second does not cancel the first. Crazy Rich Asians is a mainstream studio romantic comedy, and it behaves like one — the wealth is a spectacle, the families are obstacles, the couple wins. The film’s most interesting choice is that Eleanor is not a monster. She is a woman who made a trade and cannot see why Rachel wouldn’t make it too. That is a sharper idea than the plot knows what to do with.
The casting criticism is the one worth pressing. A movie that announces itself as a milestone for Chinese representation in a modern setting, the first of its kind from a major studio since The Joy Luck Club in 1993, invites the question of which Chinese diaspora it means. Singapore’s actual population is multiracial. The film’s Singapore is mostly one shade of very rich.
The Verdict on Crazy Rich Asians
Set against the standard it set for itself, Crazy Rich Asians is a good film that could have been a more honest one. The comedy is efficient. Wu holds the center without straining. Golding is a genuine find. Yeoh is the best thing in it, and the film is smart enough to know it.
The $238 million gross against a $30 million budget is the part that changed the industry, in this paper’s assessment, not the part that changed the art. It showed a majority-Asian cast could open a studio picture — a conclusion the gross supports, not one the studio has confirmed. What that cast does next matters more than what this one earned.
Crazy Rich Asians is a milestone and a conventional romantic comedy at the same time. The milestone is real. The convention is what keeps it from being great.
Metacritic score: 74/100 (7.4 of 10)
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