The Grace Lee Project

Grace Lee's film about women with her name is an odd combination of selflessness and ego. Grace Lee is, in a way, celebrating her ordinariness; but on the other hand, there's nothing particularly modest about devoting an entire movie to your name.

"The Grace Lee Project" reminded me of the long-ago TV game-talk show (from a time when such things could have a certain class): "What's My Line?" You could imagine their announcing "Grace Lee is a documentary filmmaker," and then having four Asian women (or maybe three and a Caucasian) coming out and declaring: "My name is Grace Lee." And: "MY name in Grace Lee." And then: "MY name is Grace Lee." And finally: "My NAME is Grace Lee." And then the panel would ask them questions to guess who the real Grace Lee was. Only this time, they would all be Grace Lee. Because in certain pockets of the world, "Grace Lee" is as common as "John Smith" or "Bill Jones."

Knowing her name to be common, as her voice-over relates, Grace Lee does research on the whole existing population of Grace Lees, hiring a private detective to access files showing how many of them there are and where (most are in California and New York). Then she realizes she can gather the information herself and she sets up a website called "The Grace Lee Project" and receives responses from Grace Lees all over the globe. She tracks some of them down, ones in the USA, and interviews them, investigating a few of the variations in type found among women named Grace Lee, and that is the bulk of the movie.

This sounds like a flimsy premise for a documentary, but Grace Lee's point is to investigate Asian-American female stereotypes. Though she finds some unusual Grace Lee's, the filmmaker starts her film with a series of sound-bites where people describe the Grace Lees they have known -- and they all sound like the same person -- namely, someone "nice," "sweet," "quiet," "intelligent," "cooperative" -- passive but accomplished and able -- so it turns out "Grace Lee" is almost a code word for the stereotypical young Asian-American woman. The filmmaker Grace Lee, the one the "What's My Line" panel would have to spot, also discovers that there are some exceptional and interesting Grace Lees – a TV newsperson, an artistically gifted youngster who has done some terrifying drawings, an almost-ninety but very dynamic political activist of Chinese extraction in the black community of Detroit (Grace Lee Boggs) -– and even a girl, also Chinese-American, who tried to burn down a San Francisco high school. She is spoken well of too – just another quiet, studious, well-behaved Asian girl called Grace Lee – except that she set fire to her school. This pyromaniac Grace Lee could not be located for interviewing, but Ms. Lee spends most of her time on the unusual cases.

If, paradoxically, the project made sense only because the name was so common, ultimately the resulting movie seems an equally paradoxical mix of blandness and ego.

After all, what's in a name? Couldn't we all do films of people with our name? But wouldn't the premise move beyond bland to outright meaningless then? What about John Smith? What about Muhammad? Few of our names are unique in the world. The Grace Lee Project is only as interesting as the women it encounters, and since naming is a rather random process, the encounters become only a study of variety and similarities among Asian-American (often Korean, but sometimes Chinese) women. If the point about Grace Lees is how similar they mostly are, why focus so much on the more unique ones? Could the answer be that there's not much in a name? But then Grace Lee the filmmaker's premise dissolves into nothing. Has she gone beyond the stereotypes, or only confirmed that in many cases they are valid? The film moves along with a breezy lightheartedness, but it doesn't go very deep.

The almost-ninety Grace Lee seems the most interesting, and it's not surprising that a key element in her vibrancy and power as a human being is that neither her name, nor her being Asian, nor even her being a woman, ever mattered much to her in the course of her long and productive life. This splendid and original Grace Lee who breaks all stereotypes and stands forth as a real and compelling person makes the filmmaker Grace Lee and her fascination with stereotypes and ordinariness seem somewhat on the small and unimaginative side. She has kept her exploration of the subject superficial. She's interviewed a wide range of people, but most of them are ordinary, and not illustrative of anything we didn't already know. Nothing earthshaking comes out of this. Maybe it's a film that young Asian American women needed to see made. Thoreau said "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Perhaps the mass of Grace Lees lead lives of quiet ordinariness. There's nothing wrong with that. We can't all be activists in Detroit.

"The Grace Lee Project's" greatest virtue is that it makes you laugh -- with, not at. The audience at Film Forum, where the documentary premiered, was predominantly made up of young Asian couples – it's a New York City Asian-American date movie. But it's hardly what you could call sexy. Like the stereotypical Asian-American young woman, it's smart, quiet, and well behaved. Unfortunately it's also a little dull, and as if to underline that, the music is singularly uninteresting. The woman in front of me was there because her friend had composed it and I felt for her. I wondered how many Grace Lees there were in the theater. Maybe none. Ordinariness isn't as common as you may think. You have to seek it out -- and then, like Grace Lee, you will probably move on from that and seek out the extraordinary, like everybody else.

In THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, filmmaker Grace Lee manages to cram a textbook worth of insight into a scant 70 minute running time, and, with a sense of humor akin to that shown by Morgan Spurlock in SUPER SIZE ME, presents a litany of telling observations about growing up female in a diasporic Asian (largely Korean) culture that, to hear the myriad Grace Lees on display tell it, almost unwittingly turns its young women into closed-minded do-gooders who, even when they do muster up the gumption to rebel, only do so out of fear of losing face for their parents and the greater community. In other words, girls who never seem to have any true sense of independence or freedom, and basically the polar opposite of the filmmaker herself - a self-professed (in the film) non-believer from a Christian Korean family who dated and married a Caucasian (also in the film) and decided on a career that all but guaranteed a hard-scrabble existence (although this film should change all that). Nonetheless, her own parents, a soft-spoken, humble couple, are featured in the films opening moments and if they harbor any feelings of embarrassment about their daughter's life choices, it's not evident on screen.

The film will probably resonate best with Korean women ages 25-35, as Lee genuinely seems unable to find a Korean Grace Lee that deviates far from familial and societal expectations ("quiet, soft spoken, Christian, petite, intelligent, really nice and with 3.5 years of piano lessons"), and those she does highlight are hard-pressed to define what makes them "different" from what their generic names imply. Nonetheless, all the subjects, while sharing essentially the same existential quandary, which itself is more a symptom of their upbringing than their parents' choice of name, still manage to betray little eccentricities and repressed desires to subvert the system, so to speak. Women of Chinese extraction, most notably Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs ("Grace X"), are also featured prominently and tend to come off as the most atypical of the bunch in one way or another, perhaps because of the culture's longer presence in the west, perhaps not. Another Chinese Grace Lee who came from an abusive adopted home and in turn took in an abused woman and her three daughters later in life, provides much of the emotion of the doc's final 20 minutes.

No film about young Korean women made by a young Korean woman could possibly sidestep the issue of religion, what with Christianity an ever-present force in the diasporic Korean community. Lee makes no bones about her thoughts on the subject in sequences involving a P.K. ("Pastor's Kid") who has her entire life planned out while still just a teenager, most likely unaware of the hidden machinations that conspire to keep her on the path she's "chosen." In voice-over, Lee says she envies the girl's unsullied and eager acceptance of her future ("marriage at 25, three kids each spaced five years apart), but the images presented on screen subtly suggest the director knows that life may throw up unexpected obstacles to challenge her glassy-eyed optimism. The girl's father is shown operating a modest but dedicated church out of his backyard and she dutifully quotes the requisite scripture to explain why this is acceptable, while the sharp-eyed viewer will no doubt see plain evidence of a split within this particular Korean community's church that has probably given this Grace Lee an even narrower world-view.

Continuing the theme, Lee meets a Pastor's wife and, in one of the film's more obviously calculated moments, shows her explaining how young girls can always get a "do-over," should they lose their virginity, during a discussion of the dreaded S-word at a Christian youth group meeting. The grumbles of frustration heard in the audience at the woman's well-meaning hypocrisy was undoubtedly the desired effect.

In the end, the audience is left with many excellent avenues for discussion. For as alike as these women are in both name and social conditioning, life will throw many of them in fascinating new directions - if only they'd have the encouragement of a community, and the courage of Grace X, to see where they lead.

THE GRACE LEE PROJECT, though it lacks the marketing power behind docs like THE CORPORATION, SUPER SIZE ME or the collected works of Michael Moore, easily joins their ranks as one of the most entertaining pop-docs of the year.

After the screening at Toronto's REEL Asian Film Festival, Grace Lee answered questions from the audience (four of whom were Grace Lees, including two from the film!), including the inevitable query about a sequel. She claimed she was done with the subject, but I couldn't help but think of Michael Apted's 7-UP series. Obviously, a GRACE LEE PROJECT every seven years might be overkill, but at least one follow-up, say in ten years time, would be an ideal way to see how these women, many of whom are still at crucially undefined moments in their lives, have turned out in comparison to the expectations both they (and others) have for themselves in the film.

The first thing to say about this documentary is that for the first 20 minutes or so it is one of the funniest ever made. The movie makes a wonderful case for the need of a movie about Grace Lees, portraying them as omnipresent and disturbingly similar in reputation. Lee is so funny that I thought it possible she should work as a stand-up comic. She comes across as an incredibly smart, funny original person. Much of it is absolutely inspired (and beautifully edited).

The film becomes weaker when Grace starts showing us other Grace Lees. She starts out strong with an elderly activist and follows up with an engaging young girl. But then she follows up with two bland Christians and a very nice, self-sacrificing woman who unfortunately comes across as somewhat bland.

What's interesting about the movie is that outside of the activist, Grace Lees actually to tend to fulfill their stereotype of somewhat bland good girls. Perhaps this is because Asian children are under so much pressure to make good that they don't have the same opportunities to get weird as kids from more assimilated cultures. Or perhaps Grace simply missed some of the quirkier Grace Lees. But the documentary suffers because the director comes across as more interesting than most of her subjects.

It's a really good movie, but while 20 minutes into it I was ready to rate it 9 out of 10 by the end I gave it a 7, because too much of its brilliance was counterbalanced by some rather dull stretches. Still, it's one of the most original and ingenious ideas for a documentary I've seen and shouldn't be missed.