Catfish in Black Bean Sauce (2000)

Catfish in Black Bean Sauce is a mixed kettle with a fair bit to like and a bit less not to like. It takes some fun risks and shows more originality than I expected while its weaknesses mostly center on one character (who also serves as the writer and director, I learned afterwards). Our story begins as a graying black couple (well-played by Paul Winfield and Mary Alice with the often-tender, sometimes-prickly sparring of a married couple with grown children) muses aloud about their jellico (tuxedo) cat, who is blind. They have two Vietnamese children, siblings adopted after the war; Mai is married and Dwight is considering marriage. Dwight hates the cat and is so inwardly myopic that he hasn't noticed its handicap. Dwight is a chronically frustrating character in this movie with mainly one irksome expression that he wears almost constantly. Moreover, he is so emotionally unavailable that he seems unable to recognize others' emotions or express others of his own. He blunders the proposal to his beautiful and intelligent fiancee, of whom a traffic cop tells him, "She's way out of your league." He muddles through various challenges in this relationship and with his family -- all normal stuff yet a great struggle for him to cope with. I could never figure out why he was so neurotic. The movie shows some originality by giving us a number of situations where Dwight wades into some fantastically weird situations and screams, only to return to a perfectly mundane moment in the present reality. The plot thickens as Mai suddenly announces to Dwight and her parents that she has tracked down their birthmother in Vietnam and arranged for her to come (the next day) and stay for a week. (Mai then becomes an almost absent character and we see way too much of Dwight's grimacing mask.) The contention between adoptive mother and birthmother seems contrived esp. as it comes to a rollicking boil. To sum up, it's a yeomanlike script that carries the water but sloshes a lot on the way to the kitchen. I would like it enough to award 3.5 stars but its aggravations beg for 2.5 stars, so on average I am giving it 3 stars. (8-23-10 posted 9-19-10)