Crazy Rich Asians and Reinterpreting the Rom-Com

Let’s get this out of the way – Crazy Rich Asians is a really fun movie. I read the books, was looking forward to the movie a great deal, and was not disappointed. It’s fun. I’d describe it as Jane Austen meets Devil Wears Prada but set in Singapore. But at the same time, I think that what the movie does as a love story is far more original than the film is given credit for.

Many, if not most, reviews I’ve read comment that the movie is a standard rom-com. It doesn’t subvert, reinvent, or challenge the genre as a concept. Which is true, to an extent. You know going in that there is going to be a happily ever after. That the couple at the core of the film will end up ok (and not just because you’re me and read the book series first). But because that’s how this story works – love conquers whatever issue it is.

And yet, it isn’t a standard rom-com. I realized this when listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast on the movie (huge shout out to the podcast btw – it’s fabulous) and one of the panelists commented that you don’t get to see the “meet-cute” - aka the adorable way that the romantic leads meet - in the film.

And that, itself, is crazy. Romantic comedies are largely predicated on the premise that “boy meets girl” – or, since it’s the 21st century “boy meets boy” or “girl meets girl.” But regardless, the rom-com is based on the two leads meeting and then falling in love. Even The Big Sick, the rom-com hit of last summer, was about the beginning of a relationship.

Crazy Rich Asians is not. The leads are already in love. They had their meet-cute over a year before the story began and there isn’t even a flashback of it. No one is falling in love with anyone in the movie. The question, rather than “will they, won’t they,” is “is love enough?”

And that is a very different question, one our culture doesn’t interrogate very often. Falling in love is all well and good, but what happens next? Jane Austen, the premier rom-com novelist, often ends with her protagonists getting engaged, as does one of my favorite novels of all time The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so does Crazy Rich Asians. But in the other examples, the story goes from meeting to engaged – which is treated as a signifier of being officially in love - rather than already in love to engaged.

Life is more complicated than the idea that love fixes all things. Being in love isn’t enough to solve all problems in a relationship, or even enough for a relationship to last. It sucks, but it’s true. And Crazy Rich Asians daringly addresses that reality.

Several reviewers of the movie have referred to Jane Austen, and one in specific to Persuasion, which reminded me of how my mom described the novel – as a love story that begins in the middle. Which is the best way to look at love story between the Crazy Rich Asians leads Nick Young and Rachel Chu. It begins not at the initial meeting, or during the “happily ever after,” but in the middle. When they are in love but the trials of making that work on a practical level are still very real.

And, honestly, I love that about Crazy Rich Asians. Making a relationship work is far more interesting and messy than starting one. Yet romances, especially rom-coms, focus on the beginning, rather than the messy middle chunk. Leaning into the complications, messiness, and realness, of making something work is rare. Act 2 is harder to write than Act 1 of a story.

Crazy Rich Asians is a rom-com in all senses of the word, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t interrogate the genre. But rather than be quippy or self-referential about it, the movie goes deeper, by looking at the “what next” of the story between Nick and Rachel. A standard rom-com would have been about the two meeting and falling in love despite the class differences – that’s Cinderella in a nutshell. But Crazy Rich Asians goes beyond that and looks at what happens when Cinderella and Prince Charming try to make their relationship work. And that is not only unusual, but it fundamentally reinterprets what a rom-com is about. Crazy Rich Asians isn’t about falling in love, but staying in love, against all odds. And what is more romantic than that?