Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our Sundance 2023 coverage.
Randall Park’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s award-winning comic Shortcomings, might as well be titled Schadenfreude. It’s the sort of exceptionally awkward comedy that feels a bit like if Woody Allen, back when people actually liked him, had been invited to a kegger with the Apatow crowd in 2007 and got consistently told off by the likes of Aubrey Plaza and Charlene Yi, as it tells the story of an immensely pitiable narcissistic asshole that was born with too much wit and far too little tact. It is often devastatingly funny, occasionally moving, and particularly easy to misread in the earliest moments, as it seems immensely hate-able in its portrayal of the comings and goings of the Berkeley creative class. But, after all, we’re seeing the world through the eyes of Ben (Justin H. Min), a failed screenwriter-turned-movie-theater manager who cannot quite grasp how genuinely lucky he is and whose support system is seemingly structured around keeping him fully insulated in his egotistic bubble, either out of a sense of protectionist pity or an unstated desire to watch him fully flame out and self-destruct.
And burn out he does. See, Ben’s got a pretty swell life: despite the shitty job and failed dreams, he’s got an astonishingly perfect girlfriend, Miko (Ali Maki), who is driven, talented, semi-successful, and, importantly, rich enough to float his layabout lifestyle. All she asks in return is that he not be a dick to her friends at the film festival she volunteers at and, occasionally, act like a reasonable human being to her and not perpetually channel the Muse of Shitty and Disaffected Sarcasm. But Ben would rather sit on his couch and explore the depths of the Criterion Collection instead of be present or, you know, fuck (which I am sure caused three-quarters of the critics in the Sundance audience to cringe at in painful recognition), and fantasize about all the girls he’d get if he were single. His friend Alice (Sherry Cola), a grad student who has made her way through almost all of Berkeley’s single ladies, watches along with a kind of bemusement, and her attempts to reach out to Ben and perhaps steer him on the right path are written off as jokes because they’re presented to him as such. But things are slowly changing: a performance artist hipster-type (Tavi Gevinson) has joined the staff at the theater, and, importantly, Miko decides that an internship opportunity at a film preservation society in NYC is one that she can’t afford to pass up. So, she leaves Ben in a state of relationship limbo, freeing him to sow his wild oats. He is, of course, immensely unprepared for newfound bachelorhood, with every relationship he seems to wander into wilting quickly after, until a trip to New York reveals that there might be a reason, after all, that Miko hasn’t been returning his calls.
It’s been years since I read Shortcomings, and at first, it feels kind of odd that Park didn’t shoot the film in black-and-white, given that Tomine’s a master of grayscale (or at least monochrome) comic art. It’s somewhat understandable that Park wouldn’t want to limit himself stylistically to Tomine’s visual imagination, but most things not directly rooted in the performances and how he captures them feel kind of generic. It would not be out of place on a pay-cable channel’s Sunday night lineup, were it two hours longer and split up into half-hour installments, but I do think it benefits quite well from the brevity, given that it might become torturous at a certain point. But what’s also interesting is how fresh it feels, given that the comic came out in 2007, and I imagine that Tomine, who wrote the film’s screenplay (and possibly designed its inter-titles), has heavily altered and updated it to fit the current moment. There’s a lot of very recent commentary on the Asian-American diaspora and its representation in popular media, with a lot of its nuances reserved, almost explicitly, for those with lived experience in the community or adjacent to it, little of which I’m particularly qualified to comment on. But the depth with which Tomine and Park have rendered their characters ensures that the film can speak to plenty of others: all that is required for entry is that you are perfectly alright with both basking in and feeling for the suffering of one of the most irritable yet occasionally charming humans on the planet.
There’s some amount of awkward self-reflection here for each and every member of the audience: Either you once were like Ben, you may have been pals with a similar sort, or god forbid, you dated someone just like him, at the nadir of both their charm and self-awareness, let loose, blindfolded, in a field of nose-shattering rakes. For all of Park’s wandering into stylistic indie norms and Tomine’s HBO-like riffing in the script, the pair never lose sight of the film’s emotional core. Sure, one can read this as a justly-deserved comeuppance and enjoy it as such if they’re feeling particularly vengeful. Still, there’s enough gray shading within the characterization, as if it were reacting to its stylistic absence in the adapted frame to make it sting. His hypocrisy, his flights of impotent rage, and his moronic attempts at life-changing action through the power of petulant confrontation all are rooted in a deep-seated and painful insecurity which Min excels at keeping close enough to the surface, so we’re never entirely submerged in loathing for him.
It’s strange to think of a film like Shortcomings being particularly warm-hearted, given how much shit it puts every character through, but it feels like Park and Tomine have taken the perspective that Alice adopts near the film’s end to heart. As amusing as it is to watch a guy like Ben fuck left and right, there’s enough empathetic cognizance on their part to recognize the suffering beneath the surface, and that, ultimately, this experience may change him – or an audience member, perhaps, if they can see their image reflected darkly through his example – for the better.