‘Shortcomings’ Could Be This Generation’s ‘High Fidelity’
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Randall Park’s Shortcomings opens with a fake-out: A Chinese-American woman in an evening gown gets insulted by a casually racist white hotel clerk. She turns on her heels, walks over to her dapper-looking husband, exchanges a few words, and walks back to the front desk. They’ve just bought the hotel, so the clerk can leave his post and go take out the trash, thank you very much. Then the couple kisses, fireworks go off, and the credits roll.
If the scene sounds familiar, that’s not a coincidence — it’s a direct reference to the opening of Crazy Rich Asians — and as the camera pulls back, is revealed to be the ending of a movie that a predominantly Asian-American crowd is watching at an Asian-American film festival. In Adrian Tomine’s 2007 graphic novel (taken from serialized chapters first published in his groundbreaking comic Optic Nerve), the film is an indie drama about a father, a daughter, and a fortune cookie factory, i.e. the kind of project that screams “mid-Nineties Sundance sensation.” Park’s directorial debut updates this preamble’s choice of viewing to resonate with a more contemporary audience; the fact that Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s Stephanie Hsu plays the woman and Crazy Rich Asians‘ Ronny Chieng plays the husband makes the in-joke that much funnier.
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But it’s a takeoff that has a bit of an edge to it, and you can feel the slight poke behind the affectionate mockery. The audience is going crazy over something that may or may not be worthy of their response, but it’s also a chance for big-screen representation. And Park and Tomine, who adapted his book, are both aware of how traditionally underserved demographics are eager to embrace anything that doesn’t reduce their communities to one-note wonders. The mixed feelings that someone might feel over a big blockbuster-y thing like this fictional Crazy parody (“It’s glossy,” says the fest organizer, “but it’s ours!”), and the argument about it between two of the characters that follows, plays like it’s reflecting an IRL ambiguity. Park is a prolific actor whose breakthrough was Fresh Off the Boat, a landmark in Asian-American representation on TV and a remarkably strong family sitcom. One of those factors often tended to dominate the conversation at the expense of the other, however, and you get the sense that Park’s passion for making Shortcomings is partially because he wants to get into things that don’t start and stop with simply reacting to stereotypes. Because his protagonist is anything but a stereotype. He’s a multilayered, incredibly complicated, total fucking jerk.
As beautifully and toxically played by After Yang‘s Justin Min, Ben is the sort of contrarian who believes in nothing but the fact that he believes he’s better than everybody else. You can feel the sheer contempt radiating off of him as people applaud, in his words, “a garish, mainstream rom-com that glorifies the capitalistic fantasy of vindication through wealth.” Besides, he’s more of a 400 Blows and Ozu guy himself. Once upon a time, Ben dreamed of being the next Eric Rohmer. But now he works at an arthouse movie theater in Berkeley, hangs out in diners with his best friend Alice (Sherry Cola), and generally wallows in his own self-sabotaging misery. This last part is what eventually drives away his longtime girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki) — that, and an internship opportunity that offers a brighter solo future in New York. But whether Ben is talking to people he’s known for ages or whom he’s just met, the guy has a knack for being aggressive, holier-than-thou, and sarcastic to a fault. “Are you that much of an asshole?!” someone asks him at one point. The answer is: Yes. Yes, he is.
Ben is a 21st century variation on the Gen X slacker, the kind of guy who acts like anything that’s not on the Criterion Channel isn’t worth bothering with and anybody who actually cares about something is a sellout, a poser, or a hypocrite. You know this kind of guy from Nick Hornby books, John Cusack movies, and movies made from Nick Hornby books starring John Cusack. And though Park is more interested in defining Ben’s relationship to the larger world through apathy and, possibly, self-hatred than ranked lists of likes and dislikes, he does fashion Shortcomings into something like a next-gen High Fidelity. There are romantic mishaps, with both a performance artist (Tavi Gevinson, nailing the hipster Judy Holliday thing) and a fellow on-the-rebound student (Debby Ryan). There’s an older, more established rival (Timothy Simons) for his ex. There are even a couple of lunkhead coworkers at Ben’s job, who take turns being the alpha and the beta nerds. This immature male will grow up by coming to realize that you can’t spend your entire life mourning your dreams and being in opposition to things. You shouldn’t even spend your late twenties that way.
What’s different is who’s playing the slacker and the fed-up girlfriend and the best friend, and how all of their worlds are partially (but not totally) informed by something not usually touched upon in these kinds of movies. Tomine is a fourth-generation Japanese-American, and has said that he used to get flack about not featuring Asian-American characters in his comics. When he began writing what would eventually become Shortcomings, the artist viewed Ben and Alice as “characters [who] were a way to have a conversation with myself… someone who’s gonna call you out on your bullshit.” Park has repeatedly mentioned the origin story of finding the graphic novel during a visit to the gallery/bookstore/pop-culture museum Giant Robot and deeply responding to these messy, angry, fucked-up, and all too recognizably human characters. Part of that, he said, came from the fact that it told an Asian-American story without the “traditional tropes” that tended to dominate such narratives. It was also, Park admitted, partially why it took so long to turn his passion project into a reality.
And while you can categorize his directing style as something more performance-oriented than stylized, with an emphasis on one or two go-to tricks to goose the comedy and the pathos — he has a way of abruptly cutting away in the middle of a line reading or big moment that ups the absurdity or the tragic aspects — Park has captured the spirit of the book without sanding off the rough edges. (He also gives himself a peach of a cameo as a passive-aggressive restaurant owner; Tomine also shows up as a disgruntled theater employee.) Both Min and Maki make you feel like you know this couple, even as one half of said couple repeatedly makes you cringe. The former isn’t afraid to lean in to Ben’s narcissism and self-pity, either, or test your tolerance; by the time he goes to New York to visit a friend and find out why Miko isn’t returning his calls, you can almost feel yourself rooting against him. That’s a compliment to how unafraid Min is of giving you an honest portrayal of a guy in desperate need of an emotional overhaul. And as for Cola — let’s just say that after the one-two punch of Joy Ride and her performance here, this force of nature should never have to audition for comedic roles again.
How much self-inquiry Park himself has put into Shortcomings is pure speculation, but you can’t deny he’s put his soul into bringing his vision of a movie that explores everyday identity politics — but isn’t just about identity politics — to life. By the time Ben gets a second glimpse at that goof on Crazy Rich Asians, he’s come to realize that the person he sees reacting to it isn’t a sap or a sucker. She’s just responding to it in her own way. There are some folks who may pull a Ben and take a more cynical view of this film: it’s too familiar, it’s too blunt, it’s either airing too much cultural dirty laundry or not airing nearly enough of it. What it feels like to us is a character study that takes the good, the bad, and the ugly of someone and gives them to you with a series of chasers to ease the burn. Ben is someone defined by his shortcomings until he isn’t. The movie itself never comes up short.
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