Red Doors

Directed by Georgia Lee

The opening montage in Red Doors, director Georgia Lee’s Chinese-American family drama, smartly removes focus from any single hero. Instead, we get a collage of personalities. Age difference binds them together, even if their diverse lives pull them apart. Using this divergent structure, the story distributes tension and feel-good resolution in strands of sorrow and strength. 

This is the sort of balanced sentimentalism the world wanted so badly from Little Miss Sunshine—to the point that the actual movie mattered less than the hype. It was sweet and fun, to be sure, but left no room for credibility. Red Doors finds room—several, actually—hiding behind the darkly-hued entrance to the Wong household. They’re a diverse gang of archetypes borrowed from sitcom conventions, but the comedy illuminates their idiosyncrasies, and that’s when believable characters start to take shape. 

The head of the house is at the bottom rung of the latter: Ed Wong (Tzi Ma), a subdued Al Bundy, who retires from a life of labor and promptly decides to off himself. Forces of nature keep preventing him from completing the job, so he oscillates from a chaotic disposition to a desire for tranquility, joining a Buddhist monastery. Lee appropriately plays the suicide attempts for laughs while the monastery comes across as a deeply serious endeavor.

Ed’s three children bustle with a liveliness he may have possessed himself before they drained it out of him. Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee), a punk-rockin’ high school student and the youngest of the bunch, spends her days as the Roadrunner in a dodgy relationship with her Wiley Coyote, a pseudo-bully classmate. Her siblings are less belligerent, but no less goal-oriented. Samantha (Jaqueline Kim), the eldest, is a Madison Avenue workaholic woefully engaged to her apathetic equal. Middle sis Julie (Elaine Kao) grapples with med school standards and her clandestine homosexuality, which she acts upon with glamorous movie star, Mia (Mia Riverton, also a producer of the film). Their liaisons are the film’s least believable romance, never too far from “Sex and the City” turf. Lee finds little space for Ed’s wife (Freda Foh Shen), who hovers above her family’s struggles but never permeates them, spending most of her time on culinary duties—the sort of distraction from real life problems that has a smidgen of practicality. There are somber moments that drag down the mood, but the food always looks scrumptious.