Shortcomings
Shortcomings but Sweet: The Comedy of Identity Politics
Credit: Roadside Attractions, Topic, Picture Film, Imminent Collision, Tango
Randall Park’s Shortcomings is a refreshingly hilarious of-the-moment Rom-Dram that explores identity with a self-aware twist. Familiar genre beats become the Trojan horse for a deeper meta-narrative, balancing big laughs and tender revelations with incisive critiques of race, class, sexuality and cultural representation. Credit due to screenwriter Adrian Tomine, who adapted this sharp-edged screenplay from his prescient 2007 graphic novel of the same name. Shortcomings doesn’t reinvent the RomCom wheel, but Park and Tomine play with preconceptions to delicious effect … and deliver surprisingly complex authenticity.
Remember those cliched stereotypes in Crazy Rich Asians? Shortcomings opens with characters watching a cartoonish CRA parody which everyone seems to love—except for Ben (Justin Min, charming in spite of himself), our abrasive antihero. Ben is a wanna-be filmmaker; this debate-among-friends launches questions that become his through-line. How should a filmmaker balance bad representation vs. no representation at all? Do people fetishize other races because of an unspoken power dynamic? Is American culture to blame for his failures? Under the guise of a more predictable movie, Shortcomings avoids cloying wokeness with nuanced perspectives and actual belly laughs, tonally wedged somewhere between Always Be My Maybe and a reverse-Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
The film’s cast feels real. Ben is a fifth-generation Japanese-American and petulant hipster who studies Eric Rohmer and Yasujiro Ozu with the same lustful intensity that he aims at cute blond girls. His girlfriend of six years, Miko (a sneakily dimensional Ally Maki), notices his wandering eye; Ben, always faultless, blames systemic racism—but when she leaves town for an internship, he chases tail. Then, just as we begin to chafe at his abrasive hot takes, we meet his lesbian BFF Alice (the scene-stealing Sherry Cola): she offers unfiltered advice that snipes at his ego. In return, he poses as Alice’s boyfriend to appease her conservative parents … an idea that backfires when his heritage conjures WWII memories for Alice’s Korean grandfather. This awkward encounter is an early indicator of all that Shortcomings does right: realistically selfish characters who have heart at their core; mismatched relationships that find cause for affection; personal idiosyncrasies that celebrate difference without cultural flattening. Authentic contradictions that exist in real life.
So what’s missing? Actor-turned-first-time-director Park knows where to place laughs, sighs, cringes and raw emotion; his direction is effective and understated. Santiago Gonzalez’s camerawork is equally unshowy, but still lustrous. Stylish production design, trendy duds and a bopping soundtrack round out the feel of a classic Sundance indie. The film’s greatest weakness is a slow middle, where Ben is at his most clueless, and the film lacks panache. To be fair, banality over bravado is a conscious choice—heavy on novel, short on graphics—but that’s a small price to pay for bringing Tomine’s IP back into the cultural forefront. His work is still astoundingly, painfully relevant. Tomine excels as a screenwriter, too, adding new dimensions to his existing opus; he deserves his own space as a filmmaker.
That said, it’s not hard to imagine the tirade that Ben might inflict on Shortcomings: faulting the film for playing it too safe, for losing depth in its thrust for mainstream appeal, for falling victim to its own self-referential critiques. There’s some truth to this: the moment when Shortcomings mocks the limits of another film, it offers itself to the chopping block. At worst, its meta-narrative feels self-conscious; nods to Criterion classics only underscore its own dependence on clichés. Luckily, Park and Tomine are in on the joke, and—in an era where movies must be woke barrier-breakers, broad crowd-pleasers AND positive representations of entire communities—Shortcomings comes pretty damn close. As Hua Hsu declares in his New Yorker critique of Crazy Rich Asians, we all “simply want the opportunity to be as heroic, or funny, or petty, or goofy, or boring as everyone else”; the characters in Shortcomings achieve this. Ben is a prism for our cultural struggles: his curve towards empathy takes an entire movie. Yes, societal progress will take far longer—but Shortcomings offers a deliberate inch forward. That alone is a great reason to look past its—er, flaws.
Reviewed at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
92 min. Now available for streaming on Netflix.