Review: Blue Bayou’s Overwrought Narrative Undermines Its Important Message

Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou is a timely but tediously overwrought drama about a particularly scandalous and nakedly racist part of America’s immigration crisis: the deportation of adults who have committed crimes and were legally adopted from other countries but may have never been granted citizenship. The film abounds in a wealth of ideas concerning the complex and, it turns out, legally contested national identities of people born in Asia and raised in the United States. But Chon fails to distill those ideas into an affecting narrative, a result of them also having to compete with the tear-jerky sentimentality of his script.

Antonio (Chon), Korean by birth and Louisianan by any other measure, and Kathy (Alicia Vikander), a native New Orleansean, are an expectant married couple whose family is in danger of being separated by the federal government. But notwithstanding a few powerful shows of passion from its two leads, you never quite shake the feeling that the relationship between Antonio and Kathy is like every other one in Blue Bayou: a means to a narrative end.

Their relationship lacks the organic sense of intimacy that might have imbued the latter scenes with the emotional heft that Chon tries to capture with shouts and puffy faces alone. Individually, both Chon and Vikander are capable of channeling much anger and grief, but the thinness of the relationship that motivates the repeated swells of emotion and music that finally drag the story to an end gives the whole an unconvincing, bathetic quality.

A case in point for how the film so ham-fistedly transforms the issues of our day into melodramatic fodder is another duo, the pair of policemen whose scuffle with Antonio lands him in the predicament that puts him on the path toward deportation. The cartoonish depiction of these two very bad cops is such that it recalls an Abbott and Costello routine, and feels more than a little discordant in the context of a sappy social problem melodrama rather than, say, an exercise in comic, allegorically driven Brechtian alienation.

Both cops speak like fat cats, with the cruder, less sympathetic of the two, Denny (Emory Cohen), seeming as if he’s overcompensating for his short stature by being so grating. As for the other one, Ace (Mark O’Brien), he happens to be Antonio’s stepdaughter’s father, which means that he’s pegged for a redemption arc that’s as artfully executed as most other major plot points. Which is to say, with less subtlety and believability than your average soap.

But despite its shortcomings in terms of dialogue and plot, Blue Bayou contains strikingly impressionistic imagery, courtesy of Ante Cheng and Matthew Chuang. Antonio has buried memories of a lagoon in Korea that occasionally fade into view as he’s contemplating the bayous and waterfront of New Orleans. Moments in which Antonio, a motorcycle enthusiast, races across empty streets, suggest fantasies of an impossible flight, an escape that would be on his own terms. Such evocative images, though, don’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Chon’s urgent political message.