The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club
October 29, 1993
Buena Vista
Historical, Drama, Comedy
VHS
B

As I said in my review of the novel--http://rereadingeverybookiown.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-joy-luck-club.html--I believe that the movie adaptation is better than the book, although it's not as drastic an improvement as with (The) Enchanted April.  The story is tighter and flows better.  Also, I liked seeing the very expressive faces, with a mostly unfamiliar, mostly Asian cast.  Rosalind Chao was already familiar to me in the mid-'90s, from Diff'rent Strokes and AfterMASH on television, but she does well stepping outside that sitcom environment.  The writing, acting, and direction are generally solid.  (The actresses who portray the mothers as children were much better than you'd expect.)  I didn't cry on this viewing, but I have in the past.

Why not a higher grade?  Two things.  One, I found the music and some other touches to be a bit manipulative.  It made it hard to just submerge myself in the world of the film, no matter whether in China or America, the 1930s or beyond.  And two, well, I had trouble keeping the various characters straight, despite previous viewings and readings.  Perhaps this is racism on my part (although the performers definitely don't "all look alike"), but I've had similar problems with, for instance, Gosford Park.  I'm not at my best with a cast where there are so many main characters.  Also, while there is more sense than in the book how the characters relate to each other-- the Waverly & June rivalry for instance is well done, and we can see how their mothers create it-- I only rarely got a feeling of how this group works as a whole.

Still, the movie holds up well, saved from being dated in part because it's about how things change and don't change across the generations.  There are certainly universal themes (such as the mother-daughter relationship), while at the same time we get to know a particular culture a little better.