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# Memories of ‘Geisha’ resemble an Oscar grab
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/memories-of-geisha-resemble-an-oscar-grab/
- Published: 2005-12-09T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T08:16:53.000Z
- Author: Dan Dunn
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Oscar contenders come out to play this time of year, so there’s a high level of expectation for an epic period piece based on an international best seller. “Memoirs of a Geisha” is such a film — with an A-list American director (Rob Marshall) leading a cast of Asian superstars — and it fails, in many respects, to pass muster. It’s certainly a marvel to behold, this big-budgeted 144-minute peak inside the secret world of Japan’s mythic beauties. The production design is first-rate, the costumes exquisite, and the actors all quite fetching — particularly the breathtaking female leads, Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li. But there isn’t a whole lot going on behind the enchanting façade, and in the end almost everything about “Geisha” feels conspicuously like an Oscar grab.

Time and again we get emotive excess where subtlety would have served the film better. The rivalry between the geishas Sayuri (Zhang) and Hatsumomo (Gong) should have been a chess match but instead plays out like a catfight. There’s good and there’s evil, and any nuances between the two got lost in director Marshall and screenwriter Robin Swicord’s soap operatic interpretation of Arthur Golden’s exhaustively researched, delicately spun source material. Worst of all, exposition is routinely disposed with via clunky dialogue — “A geisha serves as a companion to men but she is not a prostitute” — rather than through the characters’ actions. In short, the audience isn’t trusted to grasp the complexities of this “world of mystery,” so the information is spoonfed to them like children. Clearly, the filmmakers’ intent in dumbing-down “Geisha” was to make it widely accessible, but in so doing they sacrificed the very thing that matters most in the culture it purports to celebrate: Honor. Suggested subtitle for Marshall’s film: “Japanese culture for American dummies.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/120905-18_01.jpg)

(Photo: Special to the Daily Press)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 9, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/120905.pdf?ref=smdp.com)