A breakdown of the film Crazy Rich Asians; why this popular rom-com is actually problematic in its portrayals of love, race, sexism, gender, class and tradition.

I am a man of rage, but polite society has conditioned me to channel that rage into having grievances with Hollywood movies whose cultural relevance died out about a decade ago. The target of my rage today is Crazy Rich Asians, a film that’s inoffensive enough on the surface but contains dangerous narratives on love, sexism, race, and tradition. Recently, I had the opportunity to view the movie with my sixteen-year-old sister, and when it ended I sought her thoughts.

“I don’t really know,” she said, “There’s a lot to say.”

There is so much wrong with this movie that to even think about explaining it is a chore in and of itself. It’s an intersectionality nightmare; a junction where the petrol tanks of race, gender, and class collide to generate an explosion that’s pretty from afar but devastating if you even consider a fraction of its implications.

For the uninitiated: Crazy Rich Asians is a classic Hollywood fish-out-of-water story of an underdog butting heads with the stifling system before coming out on top. Our protagonist is Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an economics professor. She is invited by her boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) to Singapore to attend his best friend’s wedding. In Singapore, Rachel comes into conflict with Nick’s mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), the matriarch of the crazy rich Young family. Eleanor is mean to Rachel because she is a dream-chasing American instead of being rich tradwife material. As per romcom tradition, all difficulties fade in the face of love. Nick proposes to Rachel, willing to give up his entire family and all of his wealth to be with her. Eleanor gives in and all’s well.

I don’t like how the film revels in excessive wealth and careless consumption, or how wealth is the reward for “good people” who deserve it by being virtuous and individualistic. I don’t like how Asian representation is limited to Westerners parading around an empty, soulless country embodying the most stereotypical traits of a Chinese person: dumplings, mahjong and money. And I especially don’t like the way this movie treats women.

Crazy Rich Asians pretends to be progressive. It’s a story where historical forces are reduced to the singular dimension of personal choice; a film slathered in individualistic ideological slop.

The key to understanding this is looking at my favourite character, Eleanor Young. She’s the cold matriarch of the Young family who forbids Rachel from being involved with Nick because she’s American and doesn’t know how to put family first. Eleanor is the black sheep of the family, given poor reviews by Ah Ma, Nicholas’ paternal grandmother and head of the family. Ah Ma forbade her son from marrying Eleanor, claiming that Eleanor was insufficient to meet the demands of raising and managing a rich family. And despite Eleanor’s years of working and attempts to redeem herself in Ah Ma’s eyes, she never matched up to the ideal of a rich Chinese tradwife. I find Eleanor to be a far more sympathetic character than Rachel could ever be: she’s trapped in rigid familial hierarchies, having dedicated years of toil to the service of her in-laws, her value reduced to a nursemaid juggling labour both emotional and administrative.

The audience is expected to side with Rachel by default. She’s young, pretty, not overly assertive, and faced with an antagonist who attacks her for being “American.” For all intents and purposes, she is likeable, but not memorable. Rachel has the narrative role of symbolising American individualism, which needs to come out on top for this story to work as a romcom and narrative. Individualism centres the narrative conflict around a single person, divorcing them from external forces to make a simple, straightforward tale. The film’s U.S origins privileges those characters that, like Rachel, follow through on their individualist potential. American individualism endorses the underdog narrative: one person can succeed in the face of mountainous odds without ever confronting what made those odds in the first place.

This is a role asserted for her by other characters: not once does Rachel ever make a big deal of her U.S origin. Rachel is elite but not crazy rich, is unacquainted with tradition, and is considered a “banana:” white on the inside, yellow on the outside. In contrast, Eleanor is the matriarch of a rich family, who emphasises tradition and family unity. Having Eleanor as its antagonist allows the film to dictate morality, designating “tradition” as bad and slugging-it-out-as-an-individual as “good.” Painting Eleanor in this unfavourable light allows the film to express a stance in favour of individualist ideology:

“I chose to help my husband run a business and to raise a family. For me, it was a privilege. But for you, you may think it’s old-fashioned… All this [wealth] doesn’t just happen. It’s because we know to put family first, instead of chasing one’s passion.”

“Pursuing one’s passion. How American. Your mother’s very open-minded, not like here, where parents are obsessed with shaping the lives of their children.”

Eleanor says these lines unprompted, but that doesn’t detract from their alarming nature. These lines come from the mouth of a one-dimensional villain who inevitably gives in to the power of love. The problem is that her villainy stems from her being a caricature of traditionalism, making Crazy Rich Asians different from and more confusing than other rom-coms because it muddies the waters of morality with notions of class, tradition, and race. Eleanor’s character operates in a superposition: acting as both an individual antagonist and the worst representation of patriarchal tradition. This comes at the cost of dwindling the complexity behind Eleanor’s motivations and decisions, allowing the film’s story of a mean rich lady bullying a “poor” young lady to occur.

At the end of the film, Rachel bests Eleanor in a game of Mahjong, symbolising that the ball is in Rachel’s court; unless she chooses to move on, Nick will never marry a girl that Eleanor deems “suitable.” This move eventually leads to Eleanor giving in to Rachel’s demands. Rachel achieves a moral victory over Eleanor, but never questions the structures and norms that hold Eleanor in place, the same norms that threaten her relationship with Nick. The structures which restrict women’s choices are collapsed into a singular individualist dimension, a clear “evil individual” (read: Eleanor) who is responsible for all the obstacles our lovely protagonist must endure and overcome to achieve her rewards.

Eleanor is guilty of reproducing patterns of misogynistic trauma. But her actions feel more genuine and realistic than Rachel’s ever could. Within a constricting structure, she must make certain choices. Instead of dissecting, critiquing, or satirising the structures that have held women back, Crazy Rich Asians decides in favour of “Gotcha!” moments that seize upon a performative idea of girl power. Think of those scenes where Peik Lin’s dad (Ken Jeong) endlessly harasses her daughter’s best friend by objectifying her in front of his young daughters. Think of Astrid’s (Gemma Chan) subplot, where she divorces her husband because she doesn’t want to be responsible for making him feel like a man. It’s a scene that triggers the primal brain into a standing ovation, but looking past the superficialities reveals an instance of patriarchy affecting men.

Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t critique systems: it critiques individuals who are mean within these systems. An alternative viewing of the film is that it’s a nail-biting satire on how capitalism has affected the modern Chinese. I disagree on two levels: the film does not work as satire because it is brain dead and glamour-obsessed to a masturbatory extent. In its banality the film reveals more about the people and culture in which it was forged than it does about its subjects. On another level, Crazy Rich Asians does not work as satire because Eleanor’s portrayal only allows her to operate as an isolated bad egg, instead of an exaggerated yet naturally occurring byproduct of a toxic system. If the film is to be read as satire, its target is not the systems which hold women back. Its targets are the individual, mean mother-in-laws who don’t let the Rachel Chus of the world grab Henry Golding’s ass by the fistful.

In Crazy Rich Asians one will not find female solidarity amongst those trapped in power relations. Instead, the film is content to have those oppressed characters prance around the ring in a rigged game, designed to dull the neurons of its audience and leave them feeling more progressive than they were going in.

But hey, maybe it’s just another rom-com.