Golden Gate

In 1952, 21-year-old FBI agent Kevin Walker (Matt Dillon) is assigned to dredge up Communists in order to prove to J. Edgar Hoover that the San Francisco office is doing its job. He trumps up an espionage case against laundry worker Chen Jung Song (Tzi Ma), who has been innocently sending money to his family in China. Ten years later, Song is released from jail but cannot get a job because of his tainted reputation. He commits suicide, jumping off a cliff near the Golden Gate Bridge. Walker attends the funeral and befriends Song's daughter, Marilyn (Joan Chen). They fall in love, but she leaves him after discovering his true identity from old newspaper stories about her father's arrest.

Six years later, Walker is sent to a local university to investigate subversive activities. Marilyn Song belongs to a group of minority students that is on the bureau's hit list. Still in love with her and still plagued by guilt, Walker nonetheless proceeds with his mission after he sees Marilyn kiss Bradley Ichiyasu (Stan Egi), a Japanese-American student activist who wants to help her challenge the bureau for its treatment of her father 15 years earlier. Walker's conscience finally catches up with him, and he rescues Ichiyasu from harassment by police and gives him the FBI's file on Chen Jung Song. Marilyn later meets with Walker to return the file. She admits she still loves him but goes off and marries Ichiyasu, while Walker meets his fate on the same cliff where her father died.

GOLDEN GATE deserves credit for shedding light on the little-known persecution of Chinese-Americans by the FBI, and its politics gained some resonance from the anti-immigrant hysteria that swept California in 1994. Still, it is at best a noble failure. It was written by M. Butterfly playwright David Henry Hwang, whose work is typically concerned with exposing and subverting stereotypes of Asians. Although GOLDEN GATE succeeds to some extent in confounding racial conventions, its portentous voice-over narration ironically resembles Hollywood-style Wisdom of the East. The talky screenplay, with its unwieldy three-act structure and many abrupt scenes resembling theatrical blackouts, seems better suited for the stage than the screen. Director John Madden (ETHAN FROME) tries to compensate with a lush, overstated visual style; it's pretty to look at (Bobby Bukowski's cinematography is easily the most successful element of the film), but it borders on camp, especially when student radicals are made to say things like "right on, sister!" (Sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment