Blogging By Cinema-light: Don't Make a Scene: The Joy Luck Club

The Story: I remember a couple of years ago on "Finding Your Roots" (Season 6, Episode 12) one of the subjects—radio host Joe "The Black Eagle" Madison—of Dr. Louis Henry Gates' ancestral investigations finally just looked at him and said "Ya know, it just goes to show you—race has nothing to do with anything..."

True. But history is everything. Right down to your bones. And your marrow.

Sometimes you watch a movie and a scene jumps out at you and you know it's great—great writing, great acting, great filming, great cutting. And then, when you do what I do, when you watch it frame by frame, it just gets better. Details you didn't notice before jump at you and become obvious as creative choices. Choices you might not have noticed before as you were flooded with the scene at 24 frames per second.

Oh, this is a big moment in The Joy Luck Club, the sure-fire "hankie" moment. But, it is so subtle in every aspect that closer examination shows you just how powerful it is...and how subtle.

And yet, curiously, it's one of those moments I usually hate in movies—when the film-makers hand-hold the audience and tell them exactly what's going on and S-P-E-L-L it out for them.

In Amy Tan's book, this scene is a bit different. Oh, it occurs, but Tan's scene doesn't buff out the harshness of the exchange the way this does, doesn't make Mother Suyuan's response so insistently tender—but bless her, actor Kiều Chinh doesn't express it in her face—and it doesn't include that iconic "I see you" line that gets quoted so much on the internet as a meme. The tone is more casual with no histrionics and no tears and is mostly about crab quality. And this is as close as it comes to this scene (written from Jing-Mei's perspective):

"What if someone else had picked that crab?"

My mother looked at me and smiled. "Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everybody else want best quality. You thinking different."

She said it in a way as if this were proof—proof of something good. She always said things that didn't make any sense, that sounded both good and bad at the same time.
"The Joy Luck Club" Copyright © Amy Tan, 1989
First Published in the United States of America by G. B. Putnam's Sons, 1989

But, that is far too subtle a concept for movie audiences watching things go by at the speed of life and without the luxury of being able to turn a page back and re-reading the intricacy of a text. No, the scriptwriters—Amy Tan among them—had to push the point home to the extent of obviousness (I wonder how Tan felt about this, if she thought she might be insulting anybody's intelligence taking this so far down the emotional road—she needn't have worried as people are too concerned looking for kleenex to feel slighted). The movie had to make the jump from "best quality crab" to "best quality heart."

Besides, the significance of the scene is the transfer of the jade necklace, or as Tan has it the symbol of "your life's importance"—not literally, but the knowledge of it.

But, people who see this scene remember "I see you." The subtlety of it. The directness of it. The depth of it. The mystery of it. It's one of those magic moments where you realize the difference between the powers of book and film...of text and presentation. And their separate, tangential ways of finding your heart.

The Set-Up: It's not about the crab, really. It never is. There was one bad crab in Suyuan (Kiều Chinh) Woo's legendary Chinese New Year crab feast for the families of the "Joy Luck Club" "aunties". And daughter Jing-Mei (Ming-Na Wen)—"June" in her Anglicized nickname—took it. Then the fight started. Waverly (Tamlyn Tomita) and June have been throwing stink-eyes at each other since they were kids. But, now, the evidence says they've grown up. Waverly—the "Chinese Chess Prodigy"—is on her second marriage. June hasn't married. June did some free-lance copy-writing for Waverly's tax attorney firm and they just fired her and she's brought it up over dinner. Haven't paid her, yet, either. And Waverly hit back that the work was sub-par. No "style." And to add insult to injury June's Ma says after these words hurtful to June: "True. Cannot teach style. June not like Waverly. Must be born this way." Well, that tears it. Her Mom's been doing this her whole life, putting her down for not living up to her expectations.

Funny that so many family arguments happen over dish-washing. Everything comes clean, but you'd think there'd be more broken plates.

Action.