Randall Park, third from right, director of “Shortcoming,” poses with cast members, from left, Timothy Simmons, Sherry Cola, Eli Maki, Justin H. Min and Debby Ryan at the film’s premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival | Photo Credit: Chris Pizzello
Randall Park was a struggling actor when he first tackled Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel “Shortcoming” in 2007. The story focuses on a twentysomething Japanese American man named Ben, who is trying to find himself in the Bay Area with his girlfriend Miko and best friend. Alice, who is a lesbian. They’re all flawed, complicated, and about figuring things out, sometimes elegantly. Parks was obsessed.
Park said in an interview, “I remember thinking it would make an amazing movie.” “And in my dreams it was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to play Ben.’ ,
It would take about 15 years for the “drawbacks” to become a feature. By then Park had, in his words, been out of role. But he got a great gig out of it: feature film director. “Shortcomings” had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, where it is playing in competition with Sherri Cola as Alice, Eli Maki as Miko and Justin H. Min as Ben.
“I love the overlap between me and Alice, the weirdness, the Asianness, and the kind of loudness, almost like carelessness, you know? The obnoxiousness and the unapproachability, too,” Kola said Sunday in Park City, Utah. “Of course she’s flawed, He is incomplete. But she’s owning it, and she wants to do better for herself.
Park knew Kola and Maki before casting for the film. Casting Ben was a major challenge, he said, because he is a difficult, sometimes unlikeable character.
‘Shortcomings’ director Randall Park at the premiere of the film at the Sundance Film Festival 2023 | Photo Credit: Chris Pizzello
“There are all the shiny things about him, the opinions and the sharp and nasty comments. But there has to be a deep vulnerability and a sadness and a humanity about him that people can identify with,” Park said. “We saw a lot of great actors, And a lot of those actors were friends of mine and people I really wanted to work with. But Justin gave the most interesting performance. There’s a very human quality about him that made him really watchable.
For Min, playing a three-dimensional character with nuance and contradictions felt like a revelation.
“It’s not a type of role that I’ve often seen for myself or gotten to play,” Min said. “It seems like for most of my career, they wanted us to play one thing. ,
Park, who directed the episode “Fresh Off the Boat”, was impressed by the “shortcomings” to some of Noah Baumbach’s films such as “Frances Ha” and Alexander Payne’s “Sideways”.
Park said, “I’ve always wanted to do a movie like this where Asian American characters hang out at a diner, walk around town and talk about complicated things and, you know, going through things in life.” have been.” One of the reasons it (“Shorcoming”) resonated so much with me is because I saw a little bit of myself in all the characters. It felt very real to me.
He also has a brief cameo as a waiter in the film. But that was less a product of wanting to stay in film than the nature of an independent film made during COVID-19. For Min, acting against Park, and watching Kola break character and laugh, was one of the most fun days on set.
The film, which is up for grabs at the festival, begins with Ben and Miko watching a movie on the big screen, a not-so-subtle reference to “Crazy Rich Asians”. Later they get into an argument about its merits. Miko loves it. Ben, who considers himself a cinephile, does not. And they discuss the idea of representation for representation’s sake.
“We were very excited about that scene because we’ve all had that conversation,” Min said. “There are Asian-Americans who loved Crazy Rich Asians and a lot of Asian-Americans who hated it. But at the time when it came out, because it was such an important, important moment for us, a lot of people who maybe weren’t aware of it, weren’t really able to talk about it openly.
It also perfectly sets the stage for what is to come in “The Drawbacks”, as the characters struggle with their identities.
“It’s more of a pointed reference versus a symbolic thing,” Kola said. “It’s not just about that movie. It’s about all the big movies that have been successful in the mainstream that have allowed us to tell this kind of story. That kind of big-picture movie to start with.” To do and then subtly delve into this slice of life, I think that dynamic is really fun.
Park, who loves “crazy rich Asians”, empathizes with the burden of representing everyone.
“A film like ours, it’s about the margin of the margin in some ways,” Park said. “This is a complex community. Nothing is monolithic. We all have different opinions, different tastes, and different ways of looking at the world. And I think that’s what I love so much about this story.” What excites us is that it has an authenticity and it has a uniqueness that makes it different.