DOORS OF FAMILY PERCEPTION

Red Doors

The opening montage in Red Doors, director Georgia Lee’s Chinese-American family drama, smartly removes focus from any single hero. Instead, we get a collage of personalities. Age difference binds them together, even if their diverse lives pull them apart. Using this divergent structure, the story distributes tension and feel-good resolution in strands of sorrow and strength.

This is the sort of balanced sentimentalism the world wanted so badly from Little Miss Sunshine—to the point that the actual movie mattered less than the hype. It was sweet and fun, to be sure, but left no room for credibility. Red Doors finds room—several, actually—hiding behind the darkly-hued entrance to the Wong household. They’re a diverse gang of archetypes borrowed from sitcom conventions, but the comedy illuminates their idiosyncrasies, and that’s when believable characters start to take shape.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...