The Joy Luck Club (1993) doesn’t try to mask its literary origins. Its pinballed-around voiceover narration is so incessant that its excellent ensemble’s work often functions not dissimilarly from what you’d expect from the stars of a silent movie. Opportunities for ambiguity are, like clockwork, voided by the authoritative written word. The storytelling device can, sometimes, feel a little suffocating. So much time is spent roaming in the past that the present serves as, largely, a convenient framing device more than rich terrain to harvest from. But downplaying the emotional exposition that marked the 1989, best-selling Amy Tan novel (the author wrote the film’s script with Ronald Bass) would also compromise the source material’s appealing form. I’ve seen both the book and movie cannily compared to a tapestry. Its threads, in this metaphor, comprise the experiences of Chinese women who have immigrated to America, and their complicated relationships with the U.S.-born daughters they hope, among other things, will achieve the sort of success they didn’t. The Joy Luck Club, both book and movie, is like a group exorcism, the act of disclosure used as a conduit for healing. 

Named after a mahjong-centered social club its elder characters have, as the film opens, belonged to for 30 years, The Joy Luck Club plays something of a game of hot potato with its characters. A mother character flashes back to the circumstances that led her to relocate to the U.S. Then her daughter recounts, in miniature, her childhood — perhaps steered by pressure to, say, amaze masses as piano or chess prodigies — and its lasting effects on her self-esteem as an adult. 

Recurring among the moms (played by Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, and Lisa Lu) are devastating wartime turbulence and destructive relationships with men, to whom their generation was especially bound for financial security. Faulty romances similarly plague their daughters (Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, and Rosalind Chao), who also are weighed down by feelings of inadequacy — that they will never live up to the maternal expectations foisted on them before they could be so much as carried out of the delivery room. The film’s narratives are, of course, hyperspecific, wrought with painstaking detail and occasional whiffs of mawkishness. But they invite universal resonance nonetheless. Even those with comparatively untroubled familial dynamics know it’s impossible to go completely unscathed by the psychological and emotional lacerations cut a generation or two before.

Lisa Lu and Rosalind Chao in The Joy Luck Club.

The Wayne Wang-directed The Joy Luck Club is, like the book, unerringly empathetic, unjudgmental when characters, out of desperation, transgress in ways they never imagined they could: abandoning their children, committing the unthinkable during a spell of postpartum depression, taking their own lives. Tan and Bass’ tender, patient touch feels kindred to someone relaying their never-told life story, late into the evening, while sitting across from you, the pains of the past flickering in their eyes even while the gratitude to be cathartically listened to hangs warmly in the air. Tan and Bass make you feel, in the moment, as though their characters were the centers of the universe. 

Because there are four sets of mother-daughter relationships to unspool, it’s perhaps inexorable to find some storylines trivial compared to others, like a young character (Tom) fed up with her husband’s insistence on splitting the financial costs of everything equally. The connective point of that plot hardly has to be guessed; while it’s much less severe, she has in common with her mom (Nuyen) a first marriage where the husband (Michael Paul Chan) is a selfish, emotionally myopic dud. But it seems like an anticlimactic placeholder when juxtaposed with stories of intense sacrifice and sanity-testing personal trauma, the aftereffects of which can only be passed down.

The rarity of The Joy Luck Club’s proposition in mainstream U.S. cinema — dedicating nearly two and a half hours to the warts-and-all testimony of Chinese and Chinese American women — softens its few real faults. Its box-office success, rapturous critical reception, and sweeping ambition ought to have made it the mainstream awards contender it vexingly wasn’t. It deserved to inaugurate a new frontier after decades of insubstantial Asian representation in American movies, not remain a unicorn tragically and triumphantly invoked as a first and something of a last.