My apologies for the pun I’m about to make, but Hollywood movies about grandparents are a dying breed. Funny and heartwarming films about older people are rarely being produced, unless it’s about a Dirty Grandpa or about senior citizens robbing a bank.
Anyway, except for Robert De Niro, who played the dirty grandpa, today’s older A-list stars seem reluctant to star as a gramps. Like the 80-something Harrison Ford is still desperately clinging to the Indiana Jones franchise. Actresses his age are more open to doing grandmother roles. And that’s because little else is being offered to them anyway.
Filmmakers from other countries love their grandparents. The first film of this type I ever saw in my entire life was from Canada, The Lies My Father Told Me. It’s about a little boy who had a closer relationship with his grandfather. He grew up to loathe his own father.
There’s a new one from Thailand. Now streaming on Netflix, the film is called How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. I’m not sure if this is a literal translation of the original Thai title. It makes the movie sound like a madcap adventure or a raunchy black comedy in the vein of Dirty Grandpa.
Fortunately, it isn’t anything like the Hollywood product. It’s a funny and heart-tugging tale of a Thai-Chinese college dropout who calls himself M (played by Bilkin Assaratanakul). His mom Chew (Jear Thomas) calls him a slacker. Early in the film, it’s learned that his 79 year-old grandma Mengju (Taew Seamkhum) has stage 4 colon cancer.
For M, Grandma’s terminal illness offers an opportunity. Moving into her home would allow him to kill two birds with just one stone. He gets to escape his mother’s nagging while getting in the good graces of Grandma by being her caregiver. The ultimate goal is to inherit everything she owns.
It’s not that grandma is wealthy. She does own the house she lives in but it’s an old one-bedroom dump in a lower middle-class neighborhood. She still has to sell congee to earn a living. And M is going to have to compete with his two uncles for her modest estate. The older uncle is well off but he wants to use the property for his business. The younger one is often in trouble with loan sharks. As she would tell M, she wished the younger son didn’t visit too often. She interprets his absence to not being in financial trouble.
Grandma isn’t impressed by the attention M is giving her. She’s well aware of his ulterior motive and is bent on proving she’s still feisty and independent. For his part, he’s out to prove he’s a dependable grandson, a virtue her two sons lacked. Each day we see how he learns to adjust to Grandma’s daily routine. He also realizes she isn’t such a grouch after all. She eventually admits he’s not that big a bum and can indeed be useful around the house.
The “million” baht (that’s around P1.7 million!)mentioned in the film’s English title refers to the price of the cemetery plot Grandma wants to purchase for herself. She isn’t about to burden her own children with her expensive wish so she visits her wealthy but estranged brother to ask him to shoulder the cost. After all, he inherited everything from their parents. Sadly, the brother refuses to help. The scene that follows – defeated Grandma and her grandson leaving the brother’s house is as heartbreaking as any scene can get.
The story may seem derivative but if you’re going to write about an Asian family, it will look very familiar – it may even seem similar to what your own family might have gone through. We’ve seen it in the K dramas, and movies that starred the likes of Aga Muhlach and Cristine Reyes. Each version would have the children quarreling, with the richest sibling often being the villain who really means well.
Just last week, we attended a screening of Her Locket, which is vaguely similar to this Thai movie. After all, Chinese Thais are hardly different from the Filipino-Chinese. Thus the grandma in Her Locket is dealt the same cards M’s grandma is given. We warn you not to watch these two films back-to-back, unless you want to suffer a major emotional breakdown.
The film’s writer/director, Pat Boonnitipat, didn’t make a drama or a comedy. He wrote a film about a family. Life can sometimes be funny and also tragic. He puts in a perfect mix of both in his film. Actually, the punch lines are minimal and the humor is always dry. It’s up to the cast to deliver a sense of irony to the proceedings to make the humor work.
Much of the story is seen through the eyes of M. So it’s certainly up to the actor playing M to set the film’s overall tone. Bilkin’s acting is so nuanced, he doesn’t need dialog to express what M is thinking. The final 10 minutes of the film gets highly emotional, and Bilkin makes it a transcendental experience for us. I’d put that finale up there with the classic endings of the best films of all time.
Of course, as the Grandma, actress Taew Seamkhum is a match to Bilkin. They play well against each other and like M, she can present a formidable front and simultaneously expose the character’s vulnerable side. Both actors never go overly dramatic. Anyway, the screenwriters didn’t write any such scene. Even the heart-rending confrontation between Grandma and the brother is subdued. Yet through her own artistry, Ms. Seamkhum conveys Grandma’s anguish without chewing the scenery.
What makes the movie so appealing to us is the story can easily be about Filipinos. Never mind if the family isn’t Christian or Catholic. They experience the same problems and they have to cope with just making ends meet. Also, Bangkok is so much like Manila, albeit much less crowded. Grandma’s neighborhood could easily be mistaken for Manila’s Sampaloc district, or a more serene version of it.
The film is actually more relatable than our local movies. The protagonists look more like us, unlike the beautiful stars of ABS-CBN or GMA. In playing M, Gilbin toned down his heartthrob image by dressing down and sporting a less trendy hairstyle. We‘re also spared from sitting through long speeches and longer scenes of weeping and sobbing – a trademark of most local films of this ilk. Obviously, our own screenwriters haven’t evolved in the way other Asian filmmakers have.
