Slanted
by George Wolf
Writer/director Amy Wang’s debut feature Slanted has so many plates spinning in the air, I expected most of them to eventually come crashing down. For just over ninety minutes, Wang juggles social satire, body horror, high school comedy and cultural drama with a fearless commitment to boundary pushing.
Actually, maybe more like boundary shoving.
Chinese-American teen Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) has a singular mission: to beat out her high school’s Queen Bee Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber) and be elected Prom Queen.
Just imagine her gigantic framed picture in the hallway next to all those other white, blonde Queens of the past!
Joan’s mother, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and best friend, Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) aren’t thrilled when Joan bleaches her black hair, but that’s just the beginning. Lured into the office of the smiling Dr. Singer (R. Kieth Harris), Joan is hooked by his pitch of a perfect new life. She tricks her mother into signing a consent form and undergoes Dr. Singer’s experimental surgery.
And when Joan Huang wakes up from the operation, she’s Jo Hunt (McKenna Grace). No scars, no bandages, just all pretty, blonde and perfectly white.
Dr. Singer’s first recommendation: “Go see Michael Buble!”
Anyone who remembers Eddie Murphy’s classic “White Like Me” SNL bit from 1984 will recognize the world that suddenly opens up to Jo – and Wang skewers that world with biting humor and wry precision. But as much as Wang pushes her character envelopes, she gets balance from a more subtle hand that calls out the systems that breed and perpetuate this Lilly white playground. (Keep an eye on the local business names, as well as the photographs chosen for mantles, bedroom walls and school lockers.)
Could there be a price to pay for Jo abandoning her family, friend and heritage? Oh yes. And while I won’t be the first or last to mention the resulting mashup of Mean Girls and The Substance, give Wang credit for not giving a flying F.
There’s plenty of last year’s Grafted here, too, though Wang never dives that deeply into a horror show. What she does do is pull all of these influences through her own lens with unapologetic abandon, and a fittingly flawed final girl.
This is a wonderfully ambitious, high concept debut for Amy Wang. At turns both familiar and ferocious, it never lets you get too comfortable with its message. Funny, horrific, bittersweet, angry and insightful, Slanted feels like an experiment gone right.
