***/****
starring Whit K. Lee, Katherine Leidlein, Angela Chew, Alfredo de Guzman
written and directed by Justin Chan
by Walter Chaw Justin Chan’s Grounded is triggering for me. It opens with a sunny prologue in which William (Whit K. Lee) proposes to longtime girlfriend Mackenzie (Katherine Leidlein). She accepts–with the caveat that he must finally introduce her to his parents (Angela Chew and Alfredo De Guzman) after three years of dating. If that seems like a long time, well, he’s Asian-American, and she’s happy to say how often she’s mistaken for Nicole Kidman. My wife and I share the same racial dynamic with William and Mackenzie, though I had no problem introducing her to my parents, because a large part of me hoped they would disapprove of her and I could complete my divorce from them. I mean, I did care, but I was angry and looking for the fight. I wanted them to present me an ultimatum so I could choose not-them. Grounded made my blood-pressure rise immediately–the ol’ fight-or-flight closer to my surfaces than I thought possible after all this time. The danger of films like this lies in how I will struggle to find any distance between it and my exposed nerves; Grounded cleaves so close to the bone I thought about tapping out a few times. I’m glad I stuck with it.
For all my bias, I do think William is loathsome: beaten-down, mealy-mouthed, disloyal, and entirely undeserving of someone as sunny and kind as Mackenzie. He’s so awful as the subject of this moral bildungsroman that it’s difficult to root for his inevitable redemption. Some of my dislike of him is due to my disappointments with myself–how I might have mishandled similar situations with my parents and, more, how I might have let my wife down when my programming was greater than my ability to overcome it–but not all. William has his own vile characteristics to answer for, and in this way, he reminds me of the hero of Randall Park’s recent Shortcomings: another Asian-American man who has made it a personality to be irredeemable. During their first dinner with William’s parents in Grounded, William lies about what Mackenzie does (she’s a dancer and yoga instructor), forces long-term vegetarian Mackenzie to eat some pork to please his dragon-mother, and generally makes an ass of himself to score his parents’ approval of his choices. Mackenzie leaves, as she should, and in a flash, William wakes up to a moment right before they arrive at his parents’ house. Grounded is a time-loop movie, see, and the only way out, William determines, is for William to figure out the correct sequence of half-truths and exaggerations it will take to get his parents to sign off on his engagement.
William and Mackenzie conspire. It takes hundreds of tries to secure an invitation to spend the night with his folks, and even then, his mom and dad–exclaiming in Mandarin and Tagalog, respectively–tell him it would be better if he could find a nice Chinese girl who knows their culture. I heard garbage like this for most of my life, and it hardened me to my parents and their culture. I was told people with light eyes could see ghosts. I was told all manner of things about my wife, about how children of mixed racial parentage were born without souls, about how I was responsible for my father’s death. Grounded is a little bit too good at conveying the psychological violence of traditional parents doing their best to hold fast to their cultural values in a strange land that has swallowed their children whole. William learns at the end of his months of trial and error that there is, in fact, nothing he can do to make his parents 100% okay with Mackenzie. And so he stops trying.
The title, Grounded, has a pithy double meaning: the one, a parental ban, a punishment for a recalcitrant child; the other, a statement of stability, a neutral discharging of dangerous electricity. I had a tough time with William’s numerous betrayals of Mackenzie, with his programmed obsequiousness the instant he sees his monstrous parents–but then Chan teases out the trauma that got them all there, the twisted rationales and fears of his immigrant parents, which led to their crushing of him as a child. He allows that a parent’s decision to make a better life for their offspring sometimes means giving them the courage (or the rage) to walk away from them. I don’t love Grounded, since I believe its protagonist has proven himself too broken and inconstant to be trusted with this happy ending. Yet even as I say that, I wonder if it’s really fictional, exaggerated William whom I can’t forgive. Grounded is a light film with heavy ideas. I’ve always hated and avoided mirrors, but I recognize their importance as tools designed for the often-painful knowing of the self. I think there’s a lot of truth in Grounded. I won’t be watching it again.
