Sundance 2023: In ‘Shortcomings,’ a chance for nuanced AAPI representation

Randall Park was a struggling actor when he first encountered Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel ‘Shortcomings’ in 2007 and quickly became obsessed with it being a movie and him playing the main character Ben, a complex Asian American character in the Bay Area

Randall Park was a struggling actor when he first encountered Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel “Shortcomings” in 2007. The story focused on a twentysomething Japanese American man named Ben, who is trying to find himself in the Bay Area along with his girlfriend Miko and best friend Alice, who is a lesbian. They are all flawed, complex and figuring things out, sometimes inelegantly. Park was obsessed.

“I remember thinking, gosh this would make an amazing movie,” Park said in an interview. “And in my dreams it was like, ‘Oh I’d love to play Ben.’ ”

It would take about 15 years for “Shortcomings” to become a feature. By then Park had, in his words, aged out of the role. But he got a cooler gig out of it: Feature film director. “Shortcomings” had its world premiere Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it is playing in competition, with Sherry Cola as Alice, Ally Maki as Miko and Justin H. Min as Ben.

“I love the overlap between me and Alice, the queerness, the Asianness and just like the loudness, the kind of recklessness almost, you know? The obnoxiousness and also the unapologetic ness,” Cola said Sunday in Park City, Utah. “Of course she’s flawed, she’s imperfect. But she kind of owns it, and she wants to do better for herself.”

Park had known Cola and Maki prior to casting the movie. Casting Ben was a bigger challenge, he said, because he is a difficult, sometimes unlikeable character.

“There’s are all the shiny things about him, the opinions and the tirades and and the snarky comments. But there has to be a deep vulnerability about him and a sadness and a humanity that people could identify with,” Park said. “We saw a lot of great actors, and a lot of those actors were my friends and people who I really wanted to work with. But Justin just gave the most interesting performance. There’s a very human quality about him that made him really watchable.”

For Min, it felt like a revelation to play a three-dimensional character with nuances and contradictions.