In this indie darling, a Chinese family learns that their matriarch, the beloved Nai Nai, is terminally ill. They decide to keep this fact from her so as to let her final days be spent in happiness and not sadness, but they also all want to gather to see her one last time, so they fabricate a wedding as an excuse. It’s a solid premise and it’s a good set-up for looking at issues surrounding death, family responsibility and the differing views of more traditional Chinese and Chinese Americans. But, on the whole, I felt this film really didn’t deliver on its promise. First of all, the good; this list is pretty short. Basically, the good things about this movie are the two lead performances. Awkwafina gives a genuinely great performance as the depressive, awkward Billi, the Americanized granddaughter of Nai Nai. Awkwafina has shown, up to this point, a lot of charm and swagger in her music and acting; in this film, she dials the charisma way down and plays Billi as a character with a lot of repressed emotions. She walks with a perpetual hunch and stands like a woman not sure of her place in any room she’s in; but when she’s with her Nai Nai, she changes completely and her smile lights up the room as she radiates real love and warmth. It’s a fantastic performance, naturalistic and minimal, but still deep and emotionally driven. Zhao Shuzhen is also very good as Nai Nai; I don’t know that it’s a particularly layered performance, but the most important thing about Nai Nai is that she’s an irrepressible spark of life and Shuzhen nails that element of the role and gets some nice laughs.
But I feel like the movie around them is very lacking in terms of depth. The other performers are, I feel, either not very good or else wasted on thin parts. The other characters, of which there are a lot, feel like cardboard cutouts in a lot of ways and I was really hoping to get some development on why they were all in on the fake wedding scheme and how exactly that scheme was working, etc. I mean, for instance, the girl pretending to be the bride, right? One of Billi’s cousins is the “groom” in the scenario, okay? So, we’re briefly told that the girl pretending to be the “bride” is his girlfriend but they’ve only been dating for like a month at this point. So why is she doing it? She’s not even Chinese. She’s Japanese, so she’s even an outsider, not just to this family, but to this entire family based culture that the movie is trying to get at. I feel like there’s a fascinating character there. And in the “groom” as well. Him convincing her to join in on this charade after they’ve only been dating briefly; her reasons for doing so; the way it changes their relationship and her relationship to the family as a whole . . . I just point this out as a really rich vein for exploration that the movie basically handwaves and we literally never find out ANYTHING about the motivations of the cousin and his girlfriend. I mean, I feel like that should be a big part of a movie about a “fake wedding,” shouldn’t it? The fake bride & groom, I mean? I’m shading a bit into criticizing a movie for not being a different movie, I guess, but I think the attitude toward the bride and groom characters are kind of representative of the attitude the movie has toward everyone that isn’t Billi & Nai Nai. And it’s fine to build a movie around their relationship, but it just would have been nice to have some of the other characters come to life in even tiny ways, especially since the movie is, for some reason, being billed as if it has a great ensemble and is about this entire family in a way that it just isn’t, in my opinion. It makes the movie feel really shallow for something as central as the “fake wedding” to be so unexplored and characters as central as the bride and groom to be totally relegated to plot facilitators. I was just really disappointed by that.
All that said, the movie isn’t terrible, just shallow in some disappointing ways. The central relationship feels really good and, as I said, the two lead performances are both quite excellent. It’s not a bad movie, just far from the masterpiece that it’s being acclaimed as. It delivers some nice moments of sentimentality and some nice moments of laughter and warmth, but it’s certainly a missed opportunity to do a lot more. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – two great lead performances form a solid core, but the supporting cast is wasted and the film fails to explore either its supporting characters or its themes deeply enough. 2 ½ stars.