All in The Families
By RICHARD CORLISS
At first glance, they seem from another world, these harbingers of a new Chinese-American cinema. With their glimpses of swirling silks, their rapid clatter of languages, their arranged marriages, fatal renunciations, invocations of ghosts and ancestors, aphorisms straight out of a fortune cookie from one of the better Chinese restaurants, The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet look beautifully alien. But this is all a trick, to entice you with a vision of novelty. The Western viewer shortly, delightedly, discovers tales of universal savor and significance. Only the garnish is regional.
Like the Amy Tan novel, Wayne Wang's film of The Joy Luck Club shuttles between imperial China and today's San Francisco. Four immigrant ladies, who meet for mah-jongg and call themselves the Joy Luck Club, have four American- born girls, now in their 30s. While the daughters follow the quiet ambition fed them at birth -- to be unostentatiously extraordinary -- the mothers fret and fuss. You're not a good enough pianist; you're too proud about your gift for playing chess. "I'd rather get rectal cancer" than have you marry that Caucasian. And look at the top bedroom in this pricey home he built for you: "A million dollars, and the walls are still crooked." (In fact, the guys are relentlessly nerdy; this is a woman's movie, start to finish.) The daughters wonder what can have made these old women so demanding or defeated.
The answer is in their pasts in China, flashbacks that give The Joy Luck Club its epic radiance. The domestic dilemmas in the American scenes are minute compared with the enthralling tragedies laid out amid period splendor: brutal husbands, wicked stepmothers, subjugation and betrayal, lives ruined, babies sacrificed -- and, on the young women's part, a wondrous ferocity of will. The large ensemble (mothers and daughters at two or three ages) is evidence of Hollywood's untapped wealth of Chinese-American actresses. One warning: the typhoon of emotions makes this an eight-handkerchief movie. Bring four for the mothers, four for the daughters when they realize what brave resolve is hidden in an old woman's stern love.
Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet is slimmer, more anecdotal, but has the same theme: the sacrifices that old-fashioned parents and modern kids make for one another. Handsome, Taiwan-born Wai-tung (Winston Chao) is doing well in Manhattan real estate and has a loving lover, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). But his parents back home -- the General (Sihung Lung) and Mrs. Gao (Ah-leh Gua) -- urgently want a grandchild. How do you arrange a marriage if your son is gay? Not so hard, if he doesn't tell you. Easier still, if he arranges it himself, after Simon suggests that Wai-tung wed Wei-wei (May Chin), a pretty artist who's behind in her rent. Wei-wei doesn't mind: "It's my fate. I always fall for handsome gay men." Then -- oops! -- the parents arrive in New York, expecting a bedroom in Wai-tung's home, a big banquet and an immediate heir.
More conventionally than The Joy Luck Club, The Wedding Banquet plays with images of the Eastern character. "Fifth Avenue is too expensive," Mrs. Gao complains after a shopping tour. "And when we find something suitable, it's made in Taiwan." But as the movie ripens from Green Card situation comedy into mellow drama, it finds human wrinkles in its stock figures. There's no gay baiting or Taipei typecasting. The old folks possess hidden reserves of sagacity; the young folks can bend to meet them before saying a last, wistful goodbye.
Hollywood sometimes thinks that once people grow up, they no longer have families; their lives turn into the heroic tracking of other people's demons in an endless action-adventure serial. But movies don't have to be only about the pursuit of a one-armed man. They can also be about chasing the dragon tail of filial responsibility -- isn't that a form of everyday heroism? The Mexican hit Like Water for Chocolate proved that American audiences can respond to stories about love and marriage, food and family. The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet display this same wisdom: that we never stop being our parents' children, and they never stop being ours. R.C.