Review: Didi
For Anyone Who's Ever Been A Teenager
INTRODUCTION
This is a quick review of the newly released film Didi. Keep in mind this is but one of the many movies I watch every year, and that whatever initial grade I come up for this film could change for better or worse with time. To better keep up to date with both my thoughts on other movies and if my feelings on this film changed, follow me on Letterboxd.
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THE PLOT
Via Letterboxd: In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him - how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
QUICK REVIEW
Over the last few years It’s become a popular habit of some directors to direct fictional semi-autobiographical films that end up being big awards season players - or duds that become also rans. We had Roma in 2018, Minari in 2020, Belfast in 2021, Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans in 2022, and now we have Didi in 2023.
Coming off an Oscar nominated short film, Sean Wang gives us a coming-of-age tale in which a young boy has to navigate a life-impacting summer between his final Middle School year and his first High School year. And its set in 2008, bringing us back to the days of MySpace at its peak, instant messenger chats being social kings, and Facebook just coming into its own. And the movie uses these things to make this a very web-based story in how we watch our protagonist, Chris (Played by Izaac Wang), interact with the social scene around him.
As someone who had all but one of the aforementioned films mentioned in the first paragraph as among my favorites from their particular years, a good coming-of-age movie can really hit the spot with me; so you can imagine how excited I was to see this Sundance Film Festival hit for myself. On paper this should have really been up my alley, and a contender to be one of my A-tier films of the year. The reality ended up a little more complicated than I had hoped.
When Didi worked best for me was when it really hit on the flashbacks of what growing up in 2008 was like. I was just outside of High School then, but I remember how different the social media landscape was at the time. Facebook and YouTube were just starting to take off, MySpace was king, and instant messenger chats were how we kept in touch. Every time the movie highlighted these moments I could identify with Chris’ experiences even though his character was a more than a couple years younger than I was then. This is where the movie shined for me - though I admittedly found it bizarre that the historic 2008 election campaign wasn’t featured anywhere in the background.
Where the movie had its issues though came, for me, in its almost semi-documentary style at times. There were moments that felt very “slice of life” which very much makes this what I like to call a “vibes movie” - and these are the kind of movies that if you’re not on the same wavelength with you can easily find yourself losing interest. For every scene that Chris was taking me back to my beginning stages of being a young adult, we’d spend more time than needed watching him awkwardly get himself into situations in ways that I was finding hard to identify with.
Chris is also very much a trouble-maker. Which is fine. Plenty folks know what it’s like to grow up as the class clown only to mature as they grow older. But unlike with our point of references in, say, Belfast and The Fabelmans, I found myself frustrated at Chris in ways that made me have a hard time empathizing with his plights. He made decisions that made sense with being a dumb teenage boy with hormones, but I was struggling to see him make such mistakes in comparison with other coming-of-age films that made me more empathetic.
There’s also a much more interesting movie in here when it comes to the family dynamics. There’s been praise and attempts to create Oscar buzz around Joan Chen’s performance as Chris’ mother, but the subplot with her is such a small part of the movie I didn’t really leave thinking much about her (very good) performance. Between Chris’ strenuous relationship with his mom, his back-and-forth with his sister, and his grandmother watching over everything with a critical eye, I would have been much more interested to get more of the family dynamic rather than Chris continuing to punch himself in the face on social level.
As the movie ramps up towards its ending, I was hoping to see how all these things could bring together something that helped the movie become more cohesive for me. Chris’ social pitfalls, his relationship with his family, the hurtling towards high scool, etc. Unfortunately, by the time the movie comes to its abrupt end I found myself saying, “That’s it?!”.
But I also can’t deny this is a well-made film either. As I already alluded to, the ensemble here does do great jobs with their performances. The aesthetic really brought me back to the time even as someone who just missed Chris’ age in 2008, and Sean Wang continues to prove himself as a director that can capture family dynamics. This is by no means a bad movie; there were times I laughed aloud, there were times I was entertained; there were times I sat up in my chair wanting to see what would happen next. It’s just that there were just as many moments that left me feeling like there were lulls in time or moments that made me want to pull my hair out at Chris’ mistakes.
I’m giving Didi an initial grade of B. Not B-, not B+, just a straight up B. It’s a good movie, but I can’t claim it left the kind of impression on me as it did others. Perhaps as Wang comes into his own as a director, and on re-watch, I’ll appreciate this more than I do now. But initially, I found this to be just okay at best.
INITIAL GRADING
