Rhetorical Analysis of Coming Home Again

March 16, 2022 Post a Comment

A pocketknife slices through a short rib in the opening frames of "Coming Abode Again," a subdued gut-punch from manager Wayne Wang ("The Joy Luck Order") that adapts a personal essay by Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee. Delicate and precise, like the film itself, the cut doesn't split the flesh from the bone completely. The goal is for the richness of the latter to impregnate the marinated meat in a dish known every bit kalbi.

The culinary illustration, referencing an inextricable bond, rests at the centre of this drama where a son puts his career on hold to look after his mother, who is suffering from terminal tum cancer. Now the chief caretaker, Chang-rae (Justin Chon), a writer who had a job in New York and is back in San Francisco, quietly moves through the mean solar day tending to his frail Mom (Jackie Chung). A drab mood coats the house, equally if the air of hurting was trapped between its walls and no window had been opened to let it menstruum in months.

Their mother-son bail, fractured and mended over the years, has now reached its last class. One in which, ideally, time serves for them to cherish each other's presence rather than reproaching past mistakes. Only man as humans are, that'south easier in thought than in practice. Fifty-fifty every bit Mom's self-sufficiency decreases by the solar day, arguments flare between her and Chang-rae over his instinct to help her and her fight to retain some autonomy. Other times the conflict stems from her openness to religious consolation and his distaste for information technology.

In Wang, a key figure in the history of Asian-American movie theatre par excellence, Lee's words institute the ideal interpreter. The managing director is deliberately austere in his choices, from the sparse spaces with muted colors to the absence of music except in instances when information technology's diegetic and tied to a plot signal involving Chang-rae's father (John Lie). Rarely does the camera pace into the room where Mom stays, instead it witnesses from outside the converted family unit room as some of the more charged conversations unfold inaudible to us. Chang-rae's narration acts as the audition's entryway.

Flashbacks to the early days of the affliction and Chang-rae'due south homecoming are painted with warmer low-cal. Undoubtedly simple, Wang and cinematographer Richard Wong's articulate-cutting distinction between a luminous contempo past and the stark nowadays all the same intensifies the realization that things volition never exist the same. In those memories, Chang-rae and Mom grapple with the invisible barriers he put into identify to keep her abroad from his American life. Under the strenuous circumstances, food becomes Chang-rae'southward bonding agent. The act of preparing labor-intensive delicacies to please the others is besides a tribute to her legacy, to what will endure.

Chon, a sensitive director in his own right behind features like "Gook" and "Ms. Purple," is in optimal acting shape. Chang-rae is falling fast into a mental abyss; his emotions are in disarray. Impeccably, Chon plays him as a homo trying to contain that storm that brews within. It'due south only in the terminal stages of the heartbreaking ordeal that Chang-rae's behavior, mourning while his mother is even so alive, and the actor lose affect with film's understated grace. But even those small narrative diversions feel somewhat justified if non exactly subtle.

Equally great as Chon is on his own, including a moving and tonally intricate scene where Chang-rae meets an old friend, the motion-picture show is a ii-hander. A devastating Chung dignifies a female parent in physical desperation, just who still questions herself and those around her. Hers is a double performance, one staring at the end of life and some other, while even so more lucid, taking stock of what she built in it and her shortcoming while doing information technology. Each confrontation with Chon's character is utterly cathartic.

"My job is to be your son," an aroused Chang-rae tells her when she questions his conclusion to prepare aside his profession to come intendance for her. There are also tender exchanges of a child coming together his parent every bit an private who had a life before being responsible for some other person'south survival. Through all of these glimpses of a relationship trampled and perhaps accelerated past disease, the abiding is an ambivalence most every decision that brought them hither and the unspoken resentment that has to be relieved now or never.

"Coming Home Again" doesn't sanctify the image of the mother, simply instead aims to truly capture the total-bodied personhood of the woman Lee put on the folio. Amid the trauma that the co-leads undergo, Wang examines the rips and repairs in the connecting tissue between united states of america and the people who, through their action or inaction, mold united states of america into who we are.

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