Sloucho's Full Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
My first taste of Cronenberg was Naked Lunch; he will never do better. My first taste of the Coen Brothers was Raising Arizona; they will never do better. My first taste of Ang Lee was The Wedding Banquet; he will never do better.
There's a self-critical part of me that is willing to entertain the notion that the truly great directors really can outdo themselves, but that I will be blind to their success because of my own irascible commitment to whatever film of theirs it was that first caught my eye.
Possibly. But there is always the possibility that I just so happened to make their acquaintance when they were at their creative zeniths. It's unlikely, but possible.
I went to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon expecting to have to revise the little speech I have about what makes The Wedding Banquet Lee's best film. As I left the theater, I was puzzled by how complete a non-threat Crouching Tiger is to Lee's other, superior work.
Crouching Tiger is a fun film, a beautiful film to watch on the big screen--and absolutely worth the price of admission. But it's not my idea of great cinema. Mangiotto's comparison of Crouching Tiger to Star Wars is one of the more adept cinematic analogies I can remember having encountered. Like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, the characters in Crouching Tiger are larger-than-life and yet smaller-than-human. Like Han Solo and Darth Vader, they're huge when it comes to heroism, but tiny when it comes to personality.
The ability of Wudan fighters to fly/swim through the air in Crouching Tiger provides the audience with stunning eye candy that genuinely is reminiscent of how breathtakingly different the special effects of Star Wars were from anything that the nine-year-old Sloucho had ever seen when he went to the theater to learn the story of Luke Skywalker. It's really quite magical to see a film play by rules that are unlike any rules we've ever seen. Lee's image of flying warriors fencing as they flit from treetop to treetop is as richly unexpected as the image of storm troopers in white plastic armor firing laser beams down a corridor as Skywalker and his entourage fling themselves into a trash compactor.
It's an image we've never seen and yet find strangely familiar--an image that belongs in our minds because it is so tensely beautiful. And I'm told that true lovers of cinema ultimately swear by the power of the image. It's not what the director does with the characters that matters; it's how he paints on the canvas of the silver screen.
As a viewer, however, I find myself incapable of playing by the rules handed down by cinematic critics. Ultimately, I care about character. And just as I found myself disappointed by the egregiously bad dialogue and monotonously two-dimensional characters of Star Wars when I saw the film again in high school, I fear I was incapable of throwing myself entirely into Ang Lee's hands in Crouching Tiger because the story that he had to tell me wasn't very interesting.
Crouching Tiger pretends to be the story of Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), a warrior who wields the 400-year-old sword called the Green Destiny according to the discipline of his master, who was killed by a female warrior named Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei). Like Darth Vader, Jade Fox doesn't play fair. The dark side of the force, in her case, is the use of poison. She could never expect to hold her own against Li Mu Bai in a fair fight, so she relies on the assistance of her poisons and her disciple.
We quickly learn, however, that Li Mu Bai is less analogous to Luke Skywalker than to Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is a master in search of a disciple, but the proper disciple, Jen (Zhang Ziyi) is already apprenticing herself to Jade Fox.
If anyone is the Skywalker figure in Crouching Tiger it is Jen. And it's extremely refreshing to encounter a story about a warrior-apprentice who is a woman. The problem with Jen is that she is an incredibly unlikeable woman. She is a governor's daughter and is expected to wed the man that her father has chosen for her, which should make us sympathetic to her. But she manages to infuriate us by refusing to decide what she would rather do than marry into the Gou family.
Does she want to apprentice under Jade Fox? Does she want to study under Mi Lu Bai? Does she want to marry Lo (Chang Chen), the leader of a band of desert bandits? Does she want to steal the Green Destiny or to earn it? Any one of these questions would have presented us with a suitable conflict between our heroine and her father's plans. But the fact that her inner conflicts are endlessly reduplicated makes her the source of just about everything that goes wrong in the film.
Remember how Luke Skywalker started? He was a helpless orphan who lost the people that he regarded as his parents. He sought guidance from Kenobi. He had to work at fencing with a light saber. He winced with pain as that little flying gizmo pelted him with electrical charges that he failed to block.
Jen is the opposite of Skywalker. She is the child of affluent and influential parents who want only the best for her. When she rejects their love, it isn't for anything in particular, but just out of the desire to prove that she can take care of herself. And she can take care of herself; she gets some pretty good nookie from a bandit that is willing to play nursemaid to her after she shoots arrows at him, jabs a spear at him, and finally clobbers him over the head with a rock. She steals the Green Destiny from the only people in the world capable of defeating her in combat (Mi Lu Bai and Michelle Yeoh's Shu Lein), but they both spare her over and over again.
Lo pines for Jen. Shu Lien frets over Jen. Mi Lu Bai dies for Jen. The Yu and Gou families run themselves ragged chasing after Jen. It seems as if it must be an awful lot of fun to be Jen--being desired in marriage by rich aristocrats and handsome bandits, being desired as a disciple by the forces of good and evil, being forgiven by everyone for her own unending supply of brattiness.
But I had less fun pretending I was the flying Jen than I had pretending I was Luke Skywalker driving that Land Speeder. Even as an adult, I see nothing wrong with wanting to be Luke Skywalker. At the beginning of Crouching Tiger, it's a lot of fun to pretend to be Jen, bouncing over rooftops, skipping over water. But in the end, when she takes that swan dive off the magical mountain peak, she flies alone.
My spirit doesn't care to soar with her. My spirit prefers to treat other people with something like respect and consideration. She can take that dive off the mountain all alone; I'm sure she likes it better that way.
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