Crazy Rich Asians; Wayne Gardner, motorcycle champ

Can tradition, family fealty and mad amounts of money be defied by love?

Awkwafina and Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians.

There’s a defining moment early in Crazy Rich Asians when the main character, New York-based economics professor Rachel Chu (Taiwanese-American actress Constance Wu), arrives at the palatial Singapore home of her old college friend Goh (American rapper and actress Awkwafina). When Goh’s mother comes outside, she admonishes one of the household dogs. His name is Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller is considered the richest American in history. In 2018 Singapore, he’s a house pet. When Rachel joins the family for a sumptuous, lobster-filled lunch, Goh’s flamboyant father is stern with the younger children about finishing their food. “There are a lot of children starving in America,’’ he tells them.

And Goh’s family is only incredibly rich. It’s the family of Rachel’s boyfriend, fellow New York professor Nick Young (Malaysian-English actor Henry Golding), that lends — no doubt at a high interest rate — the film its title. Their ­estate makes Jay Gatsby’s joint on Long Island look like a beach shack.

Rachel and Nick are in Singapore for the wedding of his best friend, and so she can meet the Young clan for the first time. He hasn’t told her how rich they are.

It's important to note the nationalities of the actors because the movie, based on the 2013 book by Singaporean-American writer Kevin Kwan and directed by Jon M. Chu (California-born of Chinese descent), has faced some critic­ism for casting multiracial actors such as Golding, and Australians Chris Pang and Remy Hii, in ethnically Chinese roles.

Yet it could be argued that doing so is a clever­ gesture to one of the main points of the film: that Asian communities have complex and often rigid divisions. Nick’s mother (a brilliant Michelle Yeoh) tells Rachel that she may look Chinese and speak Chinese, but is an American. It’s put even more bluntly later: she is a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

The plot centres on Rachel and Nick facing up to this. Can tradition, family fealty and mad amounts of money be defied by love? There are interesting observations on the role of Asian parents in the lives of their children. When does crazy rich become just crazy? The performances are strong, particularly from Yeoh, who is best-known for Ang Lee’s 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But the scene stealers are ­Awkwafina and Filipino-American actor and comedian Nico Santos as one of Nick’s second cousins, the “rainbow sheep’’ of the family.

This is a glossy, energetic romance-drama-comedy that continues the process of putting Asia in a new light. I think the first time I read about Asians in Asia was in Bruce Dawe’s 1966 poem The Not-So-Good Earth, with its nod to Pearl Buck’s 1931 book The Good Earth. There still are famished peasant families in China, of course, but Asia as a whole is a new world.

Wayne Gardner, left, with a childhood friend and his first motorbike.

There’s a pivotal Asian influence in Wayne, a documentary about Australia’s first winner of the 500cc Motorcycle World Championship. Wayne Gardner, the Wollongong Whiz, never won a Grand Prix in Asia but he was hugely popular in Japan for his gutsy victories in a ­famous eight-hour endurance race over there.

It was a Japanese motorcycle team founder, Mamoru Moriwaki, who plucked Gardner from talented obscurity to put him on the edge of the world map. One of the highlights of this movie is the interviews with Moriwaki. After listening to the Australian, British and American motorcycle racers sound like Hells Angels, it’s a mind-bending thrill to hear Moriwaki talking like a Zen master. Gardner was like a tree transplanted from a pot to a mountain, and so on.

Gardner soon became too successful to remain with Moriwaki and signed up with Honda, to which he remained loyal throughout his decade-long career on 500cc “beasts”, as several riders call them. The race scenes, including a harrowing one in which a rookie Gardner runs into Italian champion Franco Uncini, who had been thrown from his bike, show what a physical, dangerous sport it is.

Wayne is the work of actor turned director Jeremy Sims (The Last Cab to Darwin), who has admitted he’s no fan of motorbikes. He wanted to tell the story of the man on the machine. He’s right to think that way. The best documentaries or biographies are also social histories. Ray ­Argall’s recent Midnight Oil: 1984 is a good ­example. It’s even more important when the subject, or the subject’s field of endeavour, is of marginal interest to most people.

After a slow start (unlike Gardner), Sims slips the throttle to show us that Australia in the late 1980s was a different place. Personally, I think it was a happier, more confident place.

Gardner won the world championship in 1987, the same year that Pat Cash won Wimbledon. A year earlier Greg Norman won the British­ Open, Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan carved up the movie screens and future prime minister Paul Keating did the same to the opposition frontbench.

In 1988, we had the Bicentennial celebrations; the first Australian Grand Prix, on Phillip Island, which Gardner contested; and Kylie Minogue released her debut studio album. Sims reminds us that Gardner, who left school at 15 and did an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner, was one of the go-to Australians of this time. So was Alan Bond, for whom Gardner did a beer commercial. Thirty years later, it’s ­almost hard to believe.

Sims also well captures Gardener’s childhood, growing up in a poor family in Wollongong. He and a friend bought their first motorbike for $5. It had only one wheel. The ­access to the people in Gardner’s life, including the 58-year-old himself, is impressive. We hear from his truck-driver father, his mother (in file footage, as she died in late 2016), his sister, his friends. As he starts to roar in the motorcycle-racing world, we hear from rivals such as Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz (who is funny), Freddie Spencer and, later on, Wayne Rainey. On the same-team side there’s Mick Doohan, who would go on the win four titles.

But the most significant voice is that of long-time girlfriend Debora­h Forbes, whom he finally married in 1989, only to divorce five years later. Sims has said that any documentary that wants the subject’s co-operation has to pull a few punches, and that seems to be the case here.

Gardner is open about his flaws. “You’ve got to be an arsehole sometimes,’’ he observes. But the line that sticks in mind comes earlier, from Deb. “His thing was pushing things to the limit — a vehicle, himself, me.” Like Sims, I’m not into motorbikes, yet this documentary revved along in my mind in the days after I saw it.

Crazy Rich Asians (PG)

3.5 stars

National release

Wayne (M)

3 stars

National release