The Grace Lee Project: She's All That

Nice. Smart. Quiet. These are the most common adjectives used to describe Grace Lee. But which Grace Lee are we talking about? Seemingly all of them. In Grace Lee's giddily entertaining documentary The Grace Lee Project, one Asian American female stereotype gets demonstrated and debunked, upended and celebrated as the movie's intrepid, globehopping narrator interviews a series of women who happen to share her given name. It's oddly fascinating. And impossibly charming. You see, Lee, the filmmaker, can't escape the cliches as she vacilates between searching for points of connection and points of distinction. Instead she abandons the self-reflective, introspective query "Who am I?" for the outward looking question, "Who are you?" Her escalating curiosity is contagious.

Because in some weird way Grace Lee could be anybody: the newscaster in Hawaii; the Detroit social activist fighting the good fight at 88 years old; the preacher's wife; the preacher's kid; the hearing-impaired mother who escapes an abusive household of white, adoptive parents to go on and rescue a friend and that woman's three children from a similar cycle of domestic abuse. There's also — much less visibily — a cruiseship cabaret chanteuse, a panicked teen who sets fire to her high school, and a former lesbian organizer in South Korea who wants to disappear so as not to upset her parents. How much does one's name influences one's identity? And what if our differences somehow draw us together instead of pull us apart? Quirky and spirited, The Grace Lee Project starts off as preposterous but ends up profound.