Borderline racist and ragingly misogynistic, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA is guilty of the greatest cinematic sin of all: boredom.
Let me explain the "borderline racist" comment. I'm not referring to the casting of Chinese actresses in the three lead roles of Japanese women. If a performance is persuasive, I forget about nationality.
What's "borderline racist" is the decision to make the film in English and then cast performers who: (a) speak heavily accented English that's difficult to understand, undermining the effectiveness of their performances, or (b) have been directed to speak English with a heavy accent, thereby hewing to an ancient stereotype that all "foreigners" speak with heavy accents. This ancient stereotype also assumes that "foreigners" are inferior as a result of their inability to master the language.
It's as though Ang Lee made BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN with the same cast (Heath Ledger et. al.) but instructed them to speak phonetic Mandarin.
Arthur Golden's book reportedly was based on ten years of research and was written in part to correct mistaken Western views about the true nature of the geisha. In the film version, Michelle Yeoh reads a long speech about how a geisha must be an artist, how she is more a companion or a comfort, and definitely not a prostitute. Yet the film posits that a geisha's ultimate goal is to find a wealthy patron who will support her, and a major portion of the running time is consumed by a contest to sell off the virginity of our 15-year-old heroine (Ziyi Zhang) to the highest bidder.
The great romantic dream of our heroine, which she has cultivated from the age of nine, is to get close to "The Chairman," a businessman. The fact that he has two geisha companions when she first meets him convinces the little girl that she too wants to become a geisha -- not for the possible honor of the achievement, but solely so that she can spend time with "The Chairman." The best spin I could put on this childish romantic yearning is "yucch!" I'm not against romances between people widely-separated in age, but that whole vibe ('I loved you when I was a child, and now that I'm an adult I want to marry you or at least spend time with you in an intimate way') made me uncomfortable.
For a film that is supposed to celebrate geishas, it spends a lot of time creating unsympathetic women. The middle-aged woman who is head of the geisha house is indistinguishable from a brothel madam and spends her day either counting money or oppressing the other women in the house. The showy star of the house (Gong Li) is jealous of and acts nasty toward the heroine, beginning at the age of nine. Our heroine's apparent compadre, another young geisha-in-training, harbors resentment toward our beauty for years and ultimately stabs her in the back. Where is the honor? Instead, we're subjected to scene after scene in which women plot the downfall of one another.
Greater cultural context would help considerably in understanding how and why everone acts the way they do. Beyond the long, Michelle Yeoh-read speech, all we see are superficial glimpses into the attention paid to hair, makeup, and shoes.
Beyond all these complaints, the film is shot in darkness much of the time, and the women simply don't look good in that (lack of) light. And nearly every plot turn is clearly seen in advance and handled lugubriosly by director Rob Marshall. I didn't care for CHICAGO, but at least it moved. Here everything is drawn out and presented in a painstakingly deliberate manner. It became a struggle to stay awake.
My expectations were not high, but I found MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA to be flat, disappointing, and faintly offensive.