Hollywood's Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences

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Hollywood shamelessly panders to China to make money, but they are absolutely terrible at it.

Hollywood thinks that by telling Chinese stories they will woo the Chinese market they so crave…they couldn’t be more wrong, as the failure of The Farewell amply illustrates.

This past weekend The Farewell, a critically adored American film which tells the story of a Chinese-American woman who returns to China to visit her dying grandmother, opened in China.

Due to The Farewell being written and directed by a Chinese American woman, Lulu Wang, and starring Chinese-American, Golden Globe winning actress, Awkwafina, as well as the film’s dialogue being mostly spoken in Mandarin, Hollywood’s expectations were that the movie would be well received in China.

Those expectations proved to be very misguided. The Farewell has been largely ignored by Chinese audiences as evidenced by its embarrassingly dismal take at the Chinese box office of just $580,000.

The Farewell’s failure is reminiscent of the poor showing in China by another Asian themed Hollywood movie, Crazy Rich Asians, which was a break out smash hit in America in 2018, bringing in $174 million at the U.S. box office. American audiences cheered Crazy Rich Asians largely due to its Asian cast, which was deemed a great success for representation and diversity for Hollywood. In contrast, China, which has plenty of its own movies with all-Asian casts, had no such love for the film as proven by its tepid box office receipts.

Crossing the cultural divide and tapping into the Chinese market has long been the Holy Grail of Hollywood, as every studio executive in town is constantly trying to crack the Chinese code in order to fill their coffers. Of course, studio executives are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, so the only plan they’ve been able to come up with thus far is to pander. Not surprisingly, Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts to cater to Chinese audiences have consistently backfired.

Disney thought Asian representation would attract Chinese audiences when they cast Asian-American actress Kelly Marie Tran in a major role in the most recent Star Wars trilogy. The problem was that Ms. Tran (who is of Vietnamese descent) did not conform to classical Chinese standards of beauty and thus Chinese audiences never warmed to her.

Chinese audiences have voiced similar complaints regarding Akwafina, with some Chinese people on social media going so far as to call her “very ugly”, which may be one of the reasons why The Farewell is doing so poorly. And this is before we get to her Mandarin, which was widely considered laughable for a first-generation immigrant, even one who left China early, according to the plot (the actress herself did not speak Chinese fluently before the film).

Another example of this cultural divide is Simu Liu, a Canadian-Chinese actor who was recently cast in the lead of the upcoming Marvel movie Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Liu is considered handsome by Western standards but some Chinese people say he is “not handsome by Chinese standards”, which means Shang-chi might face an uphill battle at the Chinese box office when it comes out. 

Hollywood has had some success in China, for instance, of the top 15 highest grossing films in Chinese box office history, four are Hollywood productions. They are Avengers: Endgame, The Fate of the Furious, Furious 7 and Avengers: Infinity War. It seems Hollywood has not learned the lesson of their Chinese successes though because unlike Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell and even to a certain extent the poorly received latest Star Wars trilogy, the Hollywood films that have found success in China are gigantic franchises telling American stories filled to the brim with spectacle and movie stars…and none of those stars are Chinese.

In 2020 Disney is once again making a major attempt to court the Chinese market by releasing Mulan, a live action adaptation of the 1998 animated film of the same name. While Mulan is based on the Chinese folk story “The Ballad of Mulan” and will boast a very attractive cast of Asian actors, including star Liu Yifei, that is no guarantee of box office success. The 1998 animated Mulan financially flopped in China and one wonders if the live action version is just another culturally tone deaf attempt by Hollywood to try to tell and sell a Chinese story back to the Chinese.

Hollywood’s misguided belief that Chinese audiences want to see Hollywood make Chinese themed-movies with Chinese stars seems to be staggeringly obtuse. China has a thriving film industry all its own and Chinese audiences don’t clamor to see Chinese stories told from Hollywood’s perspective (even if they’re made by Chinese-American artists) anymore than Americans yearn to see American stories told by foreign artists. The bottom line is this…Chinese audiences want to see American movies from America, not Chinese movies from America.

At its best the art form of cinema is a universal language that speaks eloquently across cultural boundaries. For example, American audiences this year have embraced the South Korean film Parasite. Parasite didn’t try to tell an American story with American actors in an attempt to cash in with U.S. audiences, instead it tells a dramatically and artistically profound Korean story about family and class that connects to people of all cultures. Hollywood would be wise to emulate that approach when trying to woo Chinese audiences.

And if it does want to make what it thinks are “Asian” stories, it should be culturally humble enough to know that it’s making them primarily for the art house cinemas in Brooklyn, rather than the multiplexes in Beijing.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Farewell: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This art house pretender is a conventional film through and through and not good enough to see on the big screen. If you stumble upon it on Netflix or cable it is worth watching though.

The Farewell, written and directed by Lulu Wang, tells the story of Billi, a Chinese immigrant living in New York, who returns to China to visit her beloved grandmother Nai Nai, who is terminally ill but due to cultural and familial reasons is kept in the dark about her condition. The film stars Awkwafina as Billi with supporting turns from Zhao Shuzhen, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin and Chen Han.

In a clever little twist, the tagline for The Farewell is, “Based upon an actual lie”. When that flashed on the screen to open the film I chuckled, but by the end of the movie I realized this was not a joke but a confession. The Farewell isn’t just based upon an actual lie…it is a lie.

The Farewell has pretensions of profundity, but the movie ultimately ends up being rather trite and frivolous. The film certainly has art house ambitions but they never fully coalesce and sadly end up crashed against the rocks of a painful conventionality.

I was excited to see The Farewell, I thought the trailer was good and the premise struck a chord with me. The reason the premise resonated so deeply with me was because I went through a very similar situation with my own beloved grandmother when she was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. My family decided not to tell her about the diagnosis, and, like Billi, I disagreed with that decision. In my mind Truth is always the best way to go, and people have the right to know if they are going to die. I believe it is healthy, vital even, for terminal patients to go through the stages of grief, but in terms of the decision about not informing my grandmother, I didn’t have a vote in the process.

When I went, as did other extended family, to visit my grandmother to say goodbye, I did not break down and tell her she was dying. The truth is that once I saw her I totally understood why the choice was made not to tell her and I grudgingly agreed with it. I think my grandmother knew she was dying…but the fact that no one said it out loud, somehow made it all bearable for her and allowed her to bask in the glow of being surrounded by her entire family without falling into a maudlin well of despair. Instead, the visit with my grandmother was a joyous one, a celebration of life instead of an acknowledgement of death.

It was with all of this in mind that I went to see The Farewell. I was ready to get very invested in the characters and story but the film was never able to generate enough dramatic intensity or momentum to carry me along with it. I ended up being a bit frustrated as the movie touches upon some really interesting themes, but lacked the artistic and intellectual heft and commitment to say anything of worth about them. For instance, there is dinner table scene where Chinese national, cultural and ethnic identity mix with toxic familial politics, and the result is electric…but the film never truly returns to that topic in any satisfying way and it suffers because of it.

The film also tries to throw out some art house stylistic stuff…but then undermines it all by being horrifyingly Hollywood in its resolution. That to me was the biggest error in the film, the lack of a stylistic and a thematic focus combined with the lack of artistic courage, as the film repeatedly takes the “easy” road instead of the harder and more artistically fulfilling one.

I thought The Farewell was going to be a culturally interesting examination of grief and death but instead it turns into a a rather tired “family” movie with the requisite wedding and zany relatives and silliness that accompanies it. The deeper and darker themes are left behind as the Hollywood friendly fluff takes center stage. Granted, it is Hollywood friendly fluff wrapped in a “different than usual” culture, but it is fluff nonetheless. This seems to be the new Hollywood formula, take the same old garbage but set it and cast it with a new ethnicity/race/gender and bask in the glow of critical love. Crazy Rich Asians is an example of this, as it was really just another shitty rom-com…but with Asians! The Farewell is better than Crazy Rich Asians, but it still isn’t good or even remotely original…it is just a rehashing of a tired old formula…but with Asians!

I recently watched a fascinating documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and ensuing horrific massacre. The documentary was really interesting and it made me think the subject is ripe for a great feature film. Of course, a hard hitting film on that subject would never happen as Hollywood is scared to death of China and wants to curry favor with the totalitarian ruling regime in order to keep a critical and fertile market open so they can make hordes of cash by selling their shitty movies to Chinese audiences. In the current climate of the movie industry, if Hollywood ever were to make a Tiananmen Square film a successful pitch for it would most certainly be…imagine Schindler’s List...meets Friends…but with Asians!! No doubt Jackie Chan and Awkwafina would be tapped to star in it and the repressive government who committed the atrocity would have to be changed from China to Russia in order to ensure the film’s release and success in China. The film would be awful but critics would laud it for its “diversity and inclusivity” and it would end up with a 100% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes and a plethora of Oscar nominations. Sigh.

In terms of The Farewell, the very best thing about it is the character Nai Nai, wonderfully played by Zhao Shuzhen. Even though Nai Nai is Chinese, she not only reminded me of my wondrously Scottish grandmother, but actual somehow looks like her too. Shuzhen’s performance is extremely well-done, as she creates a multi-dimensional character where others would have gone for flat stereotype. I hope Zhao Shuzhen scores at least a Best Supporting Actress nomination this year because with her work in The Farewell certainly deserves it.

Awkwafina also does solid work in the film as the mopey lead. I am not really a fan of Awkwafina, the truth is I am not very familiar with her work, but I thought she did an exceptional job of manifesting her character’s emotional and cultural burden physically. Billi is a walking slouch, the cross on her back growing heavier and heavier with every step. Awkwafina really does have an undeniable, slightly off-beat charisma to her, and I hope she chooses to do more of these types of roles in the future.

Diana Lin and Tzi Ma play Billi’s mother and father respectively and they too do solid work. The couple have a palpable relationship fatigue about them that rings true. Lin’s sharp elbowed mother is a perfect foil for Ma’s down trodden father.

In conclusion, I felt like The Farewell was not just telling the story of a lie but telling a lie itself. it is not what it appears to be, and when the truth of it is revealed, its value greatly diminishes. I didn’t hate The Farewell, but I was disappointed in it, as it wasn’t what it pretended to be, and ultimately, thought it could have been so much more than it was. Unlike the family in The Farewell, I will not lie in order to spare feelings and so I say it as clearly as I can about this movie…it may not be dying…but it is definitely dead to me.

©2019