Directed by Randall Park, this charming comedy about a Japanese American man’s belated coming-of-age touches upon fascinating questions of identity but fails to dig below the surface.
“Shortcomings,” the directorial debut of the actor Randall Park, opens with a movie-within-the-movie: it’s a spoof of “Crazy Rich Asians,” playing at an Asian film festival in the Bay Area. As Ben (Justin H. Min), a Japanese American cinephile, and his girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki), a festival organizer, step out of the theater, Ben blasts it as “a garish mainstream rom-com that glorifies the capitalist fantasy of vindication through materialism and wealth.”
I nodded enthusiastically. Too bad Ben turns out to be a jerk.
If the meme “the worst person you know just made a great point” were a movie, it would be “Shortcomings.” Ben’s opinions aren’t wrong — market-tested corporate ploys at diversity do deserve our skepticism, for instance, and the toilet-bowl art of Ben’s hipster co-worker (Tavi Gevinson) does deserve the snide laugh it elicits from him — but he is self-absorbed and fickle. His moping and griping are unearned, lobbed like wet blankets at anyone trying to actually do something with their lives, like Miko, or his best friend, Alice (Sherry Cola).
“Shortcomings” traces the belated coming-of-age of Ben, as Miko abruptly leaves for New York for the summer and Ben fumbles around, dating different women and confronting the looming closure of the art house movie theater where he works. His character arc isn’t new: Hollywood has given us numerous stunted heroes who slowly, begrudgingly, come to realize their, err, shortcomings. Where Park’s movie, adapted from a 2007 graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, feels fresh is in the way it brings Ben’s Asian American identity into the mix. Is his maladjustment a consequence of his experience of otherness, or is he just a regular old man-child?
Ben, for his part, invokes and denies racism opportunistically: He is dismissive when Miko accuses him of ogling white women, but quickly labels her new lover, Leon — a white man, played hilariously by Timothy Simons, who speaks Japanese and busts out Taekwondo moves — a “rice king.” Ben isn’t being fair — but neither is the scorned date who tells Ben that his lot in life is owed only to him, not to his race. What these arguments get at is the genuine struggle, familiar to people of color, to wrest some agency from a world that tells us who we can and cannot be.
Park’s film isn’t intrepid enough to really plumb the thorny terrain of that struggle. The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches: When Jacob Batalon, who plays one of Ben’s co-workers, derides the “Spider-Man” movies that the actor himself stars in, I chuckled. But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions. Ben surely deserves his comeuppance, but “Shortcomings” traces too neat a narrative journey to that end, leaving a trail of unexplored questions and missed opportunities in its wake.
Shortcomings
Rated R for some references to sex and pornography, and some disturbingly unintelligible punk art. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
