Cultural sensitivity is a difficult road to maneuver under any circumstances, so it's likely the film version of Arthur Golden's bestselling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, would have been criticized no matter how it had been produced. Still, it's hard not to wince a little at a film made by white Americans that purports to offer an inner glimpse into an ancient Japanese tradition. Director Rob Marshall (Chicago) brings Geisha to the big screen as a simplistic, broad epic that offers a perspective on Asian culture that's both condescending and naïve. It wants to appear knowledgeable to mainstream audiences, but all it does is reveal its own lack of sophistication.
The casting of non-Japanese actors (Chinese Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li and Malaysian Michelle Yeoh) has caused the most uproar among the film's critics, but crass as it may sound, for the mainstream American audience to whom this film is pitched, the distinction doesn't much matter. The real problem is that Marshall has his actors, regardless of ethnicities, speaking English, and Zhang and Li especially don't have a grasp on the language. What you get is neither authentic—these are not Japanese people speaking Japanese—nor accessible (thanks to the often-thick accents), essentially offering the worst of both worlds. Marshall may think that merely casting actual Asian people affords the film a certain respectability, but all it does is make him look like he's pandering to non-Asians, offering the appearance of realism while still speaking their language.
The whole movie is a throwback to the Oriental mysticism of old films, with Zhang as a poor fisherman's daughter in 1930s Japan who is whisked away from her home and sold to a geisha house in Kyoto. Geishas are a purely Japanese phenomenon, women who rent out their time but function more as intellectual and artistic companions than sexual ones. Reluctant at first, Zhang's Chiyo slowly warms to life in the geisha house, although she is constantly tormented by her cartoonishly evil rival Hatsumomo (Li).
When Chiyo grows into a woman, she is taken on as an apprentice by veteran geisha Mameha (Yeoh), who treats her kindly and prepares her for a life of entertaining rich men. There's only one rich man Chiyo, now known as Sayuri, wants to entertain, though: the one known only as the Chairman (Ken Watanabe, the sole Japanese actor in a lead role), who was kind to Sayuri back when she was Chiyo.
With its Dickensian world of orphans and benefactors, Memoirs is old-fashioned in more ways than one, but rarely to a positive effect. The plot, even in such an ostensibly exotic setting, is predictable and unsurprising, and the characters are generally one-dimensional. Zhang may be both indescribably beautiful and well-known to Western audiences, apparently the only two qualifications for the role, but she's clearly learned her lines phonetically and as such speaks as little as possible.
With a better command of the language, Yeoh and Watanabe give better performances, but the whole linguistic arena remains a debacle. If they weren't willing to have the actors speak Japanese, the producers should have just cast Asian-Americans and let them speak unaccented English; it would have drawn less attention to the incongruity.
It's fitting, though, for the dialogue to be inauthentic, since the meticulously crafted sets look like a Disneyland version of Japan, and the story ultimately fetishizes a practice that, however elegant it claims to be, victimizes and subjugates women. The auction of Sayuri's virginity, one of the central events of the film, is treated as a momentous and joyous event, and her relationship with the much older Chairman is based on a thoroughly creepy power dynamic, especially since they first meet when the young geisha-to-be is only 9 years old. While geishas are portrayed as more respectable than common prostitutes, they are nevertheless the product of a society that places women in a subservient and largely powerless position. Glorifying this system without question is a tacit endorsement of sexual inequality, no matter how pretty it looks.
Those sorts of issues are swept under the rug in Marshall's vision, though, which is so sunny and prefab that it might as well have been a musical like his last film. On the surface, everything looks great, but look just below, and it all falls apart.