Everybody is the hero of their own movie. That’s a central conceit to hybrid documentary Starring Jerry as Himself.
Jerry (Jerry Hsu) has spent his life as the hero of a feel-good story that seems very familiar: The Taiwanese immigrant who made something of himself when he crossed the Pacific to live in America. A loving marriage, a prosperous business, three successful sons, and now he’s heading for a comfortable retirement. He’s not rich, but he did OK for himself, which makes it all the more surprising when the Chinese government pulls him in to a sting operation. His bank, it seems, has been using his bank account to launder money, and only Jerry can save the day.
The debut feature of director Law Chen (himself an immigrant, from Beijing to NYC), Starring Jerry as Himself is all Jerry’s story, starting with some old home movie footage that will, in retrospect, explain what’s really happening here. Through archive footage, interviews with Jerry and his family, reenactments, and fantasy sequences, Chen pulls together what seem like disconnected strands to explain how this soft-spoken and amiable, if slightly emotionally distant, father and husband gets his one last chance to do something important, even if it’s just to protect his family from poverty, extradition, maybe even prison.
Everyone is the hero of their own movie: It’s just that, in Starring Jerry as Himself, Jerry gets to become a different kind of hero.
But if you’re getting an itch at the back of your skull that this can’t all seem legit, or should be the subject of one of those high-budget, slightly absurd docudramas that some streaming platform will commission and dump in a few weeks, then pay attention to that itch. All the way, Chen leaves little hints that there’s a crime being committed, but it’s nothing so prosaic as international money laundering. When the reveal comes, there are conflicting emotions: The pieces come together as the artifice falls away, and what is revealed will leave you both infuriated and filled with compassion. Chen finds a way to lure the audience into understanding a horrible phenomenon that we all know about, but can only understand through Jerry’s eyes.
That’s why the collaboration between Chen and the Hsus is so important. It’s not self-serving or self-aggrandizing. Instead, it’s about Jerry, and his surprising path, one that every child of an aging parent should watch. Everyone is the hero of their own movie: It’s just that in Starring Jerry as Himself, Jerry becomes a different kind of hero to the kind he expected to be. He’s not the canny spy of his dreams, but instead a man whose exploits are tinged with tragedy but no self-pity. Luckily for him, Chen celebrates that kind of heroism, and it is act of making the film, not the story that it tells, that will make you stand up for Jerry.
Starring Jerry as Himself screened as part of the 2023 Austin Asian American Film Festival. aaafilmfest.org.
This article appears in June 23 • 2023.
