(NYT) When the trailer for “The Great Wall,” a high-profile China-Hollywood coproduction, was released last year, critics pounced: The scenes of Matt Damon leading a Chinese army into battle seemed like yet another instance of Hollywood’s “white savior” complex and its repeated whitewashing, the practice of casting white actors in roles originally conceived as Asian (or nonwhite).
Fast-forward to December and vindication of sorts for this Legendary Entertainment picture: Reviewers largely dismissed the accusation, while lukewarm in their assessments of the adventure flick. “Those who ranted against the project as another case of Hollywood ‘whitewashing’ in which Matt Damon saves China from dragons may have to bite their tongue,” wrote Maggie Lee, chief Asia film critic for Variety.
She added, “His character, a mercenary soldier who stumbles into an elite corps fighting mythical beasts, spends the course of the film being humbled, outsmarted and re-educated in Chinese virtues of bravery, selflessness, discipline and invention.”
What few may have realized — and what American viewers may not know when the film is released in the United States next month — is that “The Great Wall” was actually conceived as an effort to avoid another diversity issue: pandering. Looking back, “The Great Wall” highlights the challenges that films face as they navigate the increasingly complex web of racial sensitivities.
Though Asian-American actors have been quite vocal in the last year about their consistent underrepresentation in Hollywood, whitewashing is a fairly novel concept for Asians in Asia, where most local television shows and movies feature all-Asian casts. Instead, moviegoers here have become especially sensitive to pandering, another common Hollywood tactic that can have several meanings.
As Stephen Colbert pointed out in a 2015 “Late Show” segment called the “Pander Express,” pandering can mean accommodating the Chinese government by altering story lines to ensure that references to China are positive.
But it can also refer to efforts to cater to Chinese audiences by dropping Asian actors into roles not meaningful to the plot — a form of “reverse whitewashing,” if you will. In these films, the actors serve as what Chinese derogatorily call “flower vases.”
“Iron Man 3,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” for example, have been criticized for what critics see as pandering. Ying Zhu, professor at the College of Staten Island, noted in a 2014 article that the cameos in “Transformers” made by the prominent Chinese actress Li Bingbing and the Chinese Olympic boxer Zou Shiming were “so perfunctorily inserted into the film that they amount to nothing more than another type of incoherent product placement.”
Chinese audiences again cried foul when the Chinese actress known as Angelababy made a cameo as a fighter pilot in last year’s “Independence Day: Resurgence.” (“It seemed like Angelababy’s scenes were all added on during postproduction,” wrote one user on the movie review website Douban.)
To their credit, some Hollywood studios appear to be responding to the criticism by creating larger roles for Chinese actors. Take Disney’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Although it has struggled at the Chinese box office since its release here this month, local media and amateur online reviewers have responded positively to the casting of the Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen as Chirrut Imwe, a blind warrior-monk, and the Chinese actor Jiang Wen as Baze Malbus, an armored knight.
Even the state-run newspaper Global Times chimed in with its approval. “The choice has paid off as mainland director and actor Jiang Wen and Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen have left a deep and favorable impression on audiences in China,” the article said, and went on to criticize previous instances of pandering as “lazy” marketing attempts to make more money in China.
Then again, what’s a little criticism when the incentives to pander are so tempting? China has the world’s second-largest box-office market after North America, and success here can help salvage otherwise lackluster box office in North America (as was the case last summer with another Legendary Entertainment film, “Warcraft”) or turn a hit into a megahit. (“Transformers: Age of Extinction” racked up $320 million from Chinese moviegoers alone.)
Pandering also pays because the Chinese government encourages it. Include enough so-called Chinese elements in the film by, for example, casting local actors, shooting on location and raising Chinese financing, and the movie could qualify as an official coproduction, a government label that entitles a foreign studio to a greater share of the box-office revenue.
“The Great Wall” was in many ways meant to be a solution to the pandering problem. With a Chinese director; a mostly Chinese cast, story line and locations; and abundant references to the country’s culture, it is perhaps the most Chinese film to be made with significant Hollywood studio backing.
Instead of mollifying Chinese audiences with quick cameos, the film is dominated by Chinese actors — thousands of them, if you include the armies.
The film “wasn’t coming to China just for finance or for access to the market,” said Peter Loehr, one of its producers. “It was a story that organically took place here that organically had mixed actors.”
The decision to cast Mr. Damon, an international star, in the lead and make the movie mainly in English was, if anything, an attempt to pander to viewers outside China.
But solving one problem opened up another. By framing the movie as a Chinese story packaged in a Hollywood studio film, the question naturally became: Why does the central hero need to be a white guy?
“It’s a question we will definitely have to consider in the future,” Zhang Yimou, the film’s director and a celebrated filmmaker in China, said in a recent interview. He explained: “The way the market is right now, we can’t make an internationally successful film on our own. If we didn’t have Matt Damon, if we didn’t speak English in the film, then it would just be a purely Chinese film.”
Either way, it will certainly be a lesson learned for future Chinese-Hollywood co-productions. As frustrations with Hollywood’s lack of diversity become more apparent around the world, the old rule of thumb for big Hollywood blockbusters — to offend as few moviegoers as possible — may be increasingly difficult to follow.
Source: New York Times by Amy Qin