Amy Tan's bestselling novel has been adapted for the big screen into a respectable but artless melodrama, tracing in a colorful anthology of flashbacks during a family reunion in San Francisco the often-tragic lives of four Chinese women and their adult daughters. The cultural differences separating each of the quartet of traditional Chinese elders from their modern American children give each episode a special poignancy, but while criss-crossing two hemispheres and three generations the film is forced to lean too heavily (out of necessity) on the crutch of constant voice-over narration, presumably quoted straight out of the book.
It looks and sounds at times too much like a well-produced television drama (full screen VHS and DVD versions were 'formatted to fit your TV screen', to no real noticeable effect). In fact the film might have worked better had it actually been expanded into a mini-series. Each of the separate relationships deserves a full movie by itself, and cramming so many memorable biographies (by so many different narrators) into a single two-hour movie only dilutes the emotional impact of each story.
It looks and sounds at times too much like a well-produced television drama (full screen VHS and DVD versions were 'formatted to fit your TV screen', to no real noticeable effect). In fact the film might have worked better had it actually been expanded into a mini-series. Each of the separate relationships deserves a full movie by itself, and cramming so many memorable biographies (by so many different narrators) into a single two-hour movie only dilutes the emotional impact of each story.