DÌDI - Mark Reviews Movies

Dìdi, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2024

Every kid probably has a phase like the one depicted in Dìdi. Most people would likely prefer to forget that it ever happened.

Here's the story of a boy of about 12 or 13, living that last summer before high school begins but not really knowing what to do with himself. He's directionless, because all of the "fun" stuff from his childhood—such as blowing up a neighbor's mailbox and tormenting a wounded squirrel—is over, or at least, it seems that way, now with his friends more concerned with going to parties and spending time with girls. The kid is angry, too, partly because the world around him seems to be changing, while he struggles to keep up with it, and for assorted other reasons, as well.

This boy is named Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), the son of Taiwanese parents, and considering the specificity of the details of the ambling story, one does have to wonder how much of this kid and his experiences come from writer/director Sean Wang, making his narrative feature debut. At one point, Chris decides to become a "filmer" for a group of skateboarding teens. If any part of Wang's history is present in his protagonist, we can take some solace in the fact that this fictional troublemaker of a kid, filled with such resentment and uncertainty, grew up to have some amount of reflection about this phase of life.

The big question, though, is just how much insight this movie shows about this character. By the end, there's the sense that Chris can recognize his mistakes and maybe let go of some of his petty feelings toward those whom he perceives as wronging him. That only comes at the very end of Wang's movie, however, and until that point, Chris is tough to like and keeps making things so hard for himself, not to mention others, that the final notes here come across as disingenuous. If the kid has learned any lessons, a single apology and a quick nod of the head don't particularly provide much of a counterbalance to everything else he has done.

Obviously, he is a kid, so much of this behavior and his attitude are to be expected. After the mailbox incident (which he and friends record and post online, to boot), we first meet Chris during an uncomfortable dinner with his family.

There's his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), who tends the house and paints in her spare time while her husband, Chris' father, is back in Taiwan, working to support the family. The mother eventually becomes the voice of some reason for her son, but like a good number of children trying to find themselves and their way, Chris won't listen and sees his mother as an obstacle or a source of some embarrassment.

The boy's older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) is about to head away for college, but that doesn't stop the two from arguing with, mocking, and viciously insulting each other over dinner. In retaliation for Vivian saying that he has no friends and that nobody likes him, Chris urinates in a bottle of his sister's skin lotion, and honestly, it's difficult not to see Vivian making a pretty good point about her brother.

The only bright side in the home is Chris' paternal grandmother, lovingly called Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua). Even then, grandma has a grudge of sorts against her daughter-in-law for her son's long absence and for how her grandchildren can act in front of her.

Most of the story, though, is dedicated to Chris attempting to navigate the confusion of his best friends moving on with other concerns, his crush on classmate Madi (Maheala Park), and in what he actually has any interest. Some of these conversations and awkward interactions are in person, such as when Madi agrees to hang out with him one night and says he's pretty cute "for an Asian." That line might inform why he later tells the skateboarders he's "only half-Asian," but as with so much of Chris' emotions and thought processes, his motives are kept at a distance in favor of showing us the kid continually messing up on account of whatever they may be.

A lot of the talk and relationship-building-and-destroying, though, happens online, with the story set in the early days of social networking sites. Chris gets ideas of what to say to Madi from her online profile, and being excluded from a pal's "top eight friends" or blocking someone on an instant-messaging platform amounts to the end of that bond—now and, maybe, forever. Such moments are, perhaps, the best glimpse we get of Chris' feelings and thinking, and it's fascinating how Wang communicates them by way of a cursor on a screen and messages typed but never sent.

Even so, there's a constant sense that something is missing from this character, beyond any perspective of him outside of his own. Dìdi seems to be working under the broad assumption that anyone and everyone can recognize and sympathize with its protagonist, simply because he's young and bewildered and filled with so many doubts about himself. That's true to a certain extent, but Wang pushes the limits of that understanding with this shallow depiction of the kid.

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