Dìdi
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Sean Wang. Cast: Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua, Raul Dial, Aaron Chang, Mahaela Park, Alysha Syed, Alaysia Simmons, Chiron Cillia Denk, Montay Boseman, Sunil Mukherjee Maurillo. Screenplay: Sean Wang.VOR:④
Formulaic start only makes later departures count more. Takes real mettle to work so much from memory and be unromantic about yourself.
I wasn't completely sold on Dědi through almost the halfway point. Too often it pushed for laughs and trotted out character details in a pretty Sundance Lab way, while laying all-too-clear groundwork for inevitable story developments in the back nine. There certainly wasn't much in the filmmaking to make up for the middle-of-the-roadness elsewhere, even if Dědi's still an easy watch. But I must say, as writer-director Sean Wang slowly shifts from a droll comedy about an obnoxious teen to a growing and very real-seeming sense of inward and outward fallout—with friends and family pulling up the drawbridges, till Chris's world is all moat, no castle—the movie had me sitting up straight. Dědi captures almost too well a facet of adolescence I'd almost forgotten: those periods, longer for some than for others, of sliding without noticing from a couple botched encounters and alienating choices to a social purgatory you seem powerless to undo.
The chill in the movie's second hour is unnervingly credible, after a first hour when so much, even the pleasures of script and performance, felt a little synthetic. I hadn't seen for some time such a persuasive portrait of an early-teens misfit who starts making everyone uncomfortable, with social miscalculation upon social miscalculation, and who knows he has himself to blame. Executive producer Joan Chen gives as moving and delicate a performance as you've heard as Chris's mother, though some of the writing in her big Act V speech sounds like a screenwriter's idea of what a mom might say to re-forge a filial reconciliation; Wang may well have made peace with his own mother, but I'm not sure he's fully looked at life from both sides now, not as much as he hopes he has and not enough to write the monologue this character deserves.
Dědi navigates other tricky emotional waters, too, like the way a sibling relationship can feel both newly close and down to its last-ever breath, as the older preps to leave home; like the inability to discern if you've really upset people you like and whose respect you crave, or if you're definitely relitigating things way more than your pals are; about sitting in front of a computer screen, as early as 2008, and wondering how many of your friends are really your friends, including that one you haven't written back to a little while and who hasn't written you, either. Dědi improves measurably as it goes, all the way through its impressively unresolved finish. And several of these young actors (Wang, Chen, Park, Dial Denk) would be well worth casting elsewhere. Grade:B
