Crazy Rich Asians

Jon M. Chu has made an old kind of film. The outsider is brought home to meet the family, the family has money, and the mother does not approve. Kevin Kwan’s novel supplied the money; Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli’s script keeps the shape. What is new is where it happens and who is in it. Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an economics professor in New York, flies to Singapore with Nick Young (Henry Golding) for his best friend’s wedding and starts to work out on the plane that he is heir to one of the richest families in Asia. It is a good-natured, well-made, often funny film that looks at enormous wealth and finds it mostly lovely. We enjoyed it, we recommend it, and we did not believe its lesson for a minute.

Myron Kerstein’s editing does its best work in the first ten minutes. Nick and Rachel are photographed in a New York restaurant and the news crosses the world in a chain of texts and calls, cut as fast as thumbs can move, so we know what the Youngs are before we have met one. Vanja Černjul then shoots Singapore the way a tourist board would if it had taste: hawker stalls under strip lights and steam, the Marina Bay towers lit across the water, and Nelson Coates’s Young mansion, a colonial pile with lanterns strung over the lawn. Mary E. Vogt dresses Michelle Yeoh’s Eleanor in silk and jade and never once lets her look surprised by a room.

Wu gives the film its centre. Rachel is clever, unimpressed and out of her depth, and Wu plays all three at once. Yeoh’s Eleanor is the performance, though. At their first meeting, at a party on the lawn, Eleanor asks about Rachel’s mother, hears that she came from China alone and raised a daughter to follow her passion, and says, “how American.” Yeoh makes two words do a page of work. There is a kitchen scene later, which we will not describe, where Eleanor explains what the family cost her, and Yeoh does not soften it or ask to be liked. We had come in ready to dislike her and for several minutes we were on her side. It was how little she does with her face that did it: the eyes go flat and she trusts us to fill in the rest.

The supporting cast carry the comedy. Awkwafina’s Peik Lin, Rachel’s college friend, lives in a house that is gold from the floor up, and Ken Jeong, as her father, gets his laughs by being the most embarrassing man at his own dinner table. Ronny Chieng and Jimmy O. Yang play relations who exist to be awful, and are. Henry Golding is handsome, pleasant and slightly blank; Nick is the man everything happens around, and Golding does not find much to do with him except look sorry, which he does well.

The trouble is the money. The script opens with Rachel teaching game theory, and then Chu films every jet, yacht and party as though he had been asked to sell them. The film means to say that the wealth is empty and the people inside it unhappy, and it says so, out loud, more than once. Černjul’s camera does not agree; it lingers on the shoes. Gemma Chan’s Astrid has the one storyline that takes the point seriously, a marriage going wrong in an expensive flat, and the film keeps leaving her for another party. We felt our attention go every time it came back to her, not because Chan is dull, she is not, but because Lim and Chiarelli never give her a scene that lands. Brian Tyler’s score swoons on cue, and the last twenty minutes swoon with it. The ending is sweeter than anything that came before it.

Against the genre it sits above most studio romantic comedies of its decade, which is not saying a great deal, and below the comedies of manners it borrows from. Most critics have been a little warmer than we are, and we can see why: a Hollywood romantic comedy led entirely by Asian actors was rare enough that the fact of it was news, and the film carries that lightly and well. That is a fact about the industry, though, not about the script.

It runs 121 minutes and contains a wedding, a stag weekend, a hen weekend and a great many dumplings. You will want to book a flight before the credits, and we suspect that was at least half the point.