**/****
starring Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Timothy Simons
written by Adrian Tomine, based on his graphic novel
directed by Randall Park
by Walter Chaw I feel about Randall Park’s Shortcomings the same way I feel about Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity (2000), in that they’re both films I (would have) liked in my mid-twenties that I don’t like in my early-fifties, now that the ardour of my sexual jealousy has waned in proportion to my increased confidence in myself and my marriage. Similarly, I see the angst of its essentially unlikeable hero as distasteful rather than relatable and not meaningfully salved by trenchant cultural observations or incisive insights or wit, what little there is of it. It’s…a bit of a wallow in the company of a meanspirited, self-hating narcissist so self-destructive it’s easy to lose empathy for the three women in his life he takes for granted, abuses, and otherwise exploits. He’s a charisma vampire, sucking the energy out of every environment. He’s a black hole–and like most black holes, his primary function is to suck. I’m aware that Woody Allen made an entire career out of ethnically sucking, but I’d offer that at least Woody, in his prime, was funny. A creep, maybe, but a funny creep.
Ben (Justin H. Min) is a Japanese-American film bro who raises his nose at Crazy Rich Asians but feels bound enough by the cultural landmark it represents to keep his opinion to himself. So far, so good in terms of touching on a real issue in representation politics, but his view is undermined by his misguided aspirations of becoming a director. Now it’s less about race than it is about Reddit-thread movie-buff gatekeeping nonsense, and when a film forces me to take the side of Crazy Rich Asians, it’s already fading fast with little hope of recovery. Ben’s best friend is Alice (Sherry Cola, playing the same character she played in Joy Ride), who, in her hilarious, brassy, “feels ad-libbed, probably was ad-libbed” patter chides Ben for being an arrogant, gaslighting prick who’s a self-flagellating Morrissey sadboi on the one side with delusions of Von Stroheim on the other. Ben is dating long-suffering Miko (Ally Maki), who’s deeply unhappy and probably afraid of Ben–for good reason. She tells him she’s moving to New York (from San Francisco) for a few months on a prestigious internship, but in reality she’s taking a vacation from her boyfriend.
Once separated, Ben tries to seduce Autumn (Tavi Gevinson), the young woman he’s hired at the movie theatre he manages, then ends up sleeping with Sasha (Debby Ryan), whom he meets at a party to which Alice drags him kicking and screaming. The politics of object choice are the main topic of discussion for most of the film, with Ben having a white-girl fetish while accusing all Asian women who date white men of succumbing to a white man’s Asian-woman fetish. There’s a rich and troubling vein to mine there, but Shortcomings doesn’t do it in good faith. Autumn is a wackadoodle weirdo performance artist whose art Ben pretends to like. He’s patronizing about it in a broad, asshole way, and she falls for it. Ben is unlikeable and leveraging an inexcusable power dynamic to gain access to Autumn, and the portrayal of Autumn as a beautiful woman somehow unaccustomed to being shined on for the purposes of clumsy seduction is unforgivable. I get it, she’s a bimbo and, for all of Ben’s faults, still beneath him. Ben makes a pass and Autumn gags–her physical revulsion of him a phenomenon she chalks up to her body knowing something her mind doesn’t. It’s played as a joke, yet there are so many places to put the punchline, and at least a few of those targets are queasy, to say the least. The joke being on Autumn for being a bad liar is the best outcome, though even that carries with it a sharp critique of her that, given how the entirety of her character is a mean gag, feels like piling on. Maybe the joke is on Ben for being disgusting to Autumn, which…knowing what we know, okay, but knowing what Autumn knows? I’m not so sure.
I’m also conflicted about the humiliation of Miko’s new boyfriend, Leon (Timothy Simons), a successful fashion designer and photographer fluent in Japanese, made into a buffoon for doing his best to dodge cultural landmines he’s helpless to step on anyway. Has he fetishized Japanese culture by being attracted to the eminently decent Miko? Is evidence of that his respect for the culture and his learning of the language? We never find out enough about Leon to know whether he was actually born in Japan, just as Ben was born in the United States. Wouldn’t that change the conversation around acculturation vs. assimilation? Through it all, Ben constantly barrels through any nuance with rage and extraordinary selfishness. He offends Alice’s new girlfriend, stalks Miko (to the approval of Alice?), and does his best to manipulate every woman unfortunate enough to fall into his gravitational pull and become one of his satellites; he’s such a solipsistic troll that when a woman approaches him at the airport to ask if anyone is sitting at his table, he still presumes, even after weeks of humbling, that she wants to sit with him, not to borrow an empty chair to sit with people capable of loving her. Travis Bickle would make a better boyfriend than Ben. If only Shortcomings dealt with him honestly instead of offering him redemption without his having hit rock bottom. Giving an antihero a second chance before he’s earned one feels like cowardice. Ben doesn’t have to stay in Hell, but he should spend some time there. Bad guys, after all, win enough.
