Green Destiny Takes A Hand

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I was once part of a play where the entire second act revolved around a murder. Problem was, every night, like clockwork, the murderer's gun would jam. Mind you, we loosed whole rounds in approximately 525, 600 other scenes throughout the show, but the one time it counted, the bullet always missed its cue. After a while, we were so discouraged we just about wound up not loading the damn thing at all-it seemed there was a better chance that it would produce a bullet out of thin air than actually expunge the one we inserted. That's when we got the talk.

"Whether the gun goes off or not is irrelevant", our director said. "Ideally, if you immerse yourself in the part you're playing and sell this piece, really sell it, you could yell 'BANG!', drag the body offstage, and move right the play right along without a single unwarranted giggle."

The miracle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is that, while the story technically hinges on a series of battles , you could surgically remove all the fisticuffs, replace them with verbal altercations, and still wind up with a compulsively watchable work of startling depth and thematic fecundity. It's just that great.

Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). Legendary warriors. Best of friends. Each nursing a secret longing for the other, each all at once too inflated with and constricted by pride to act on their ever-burgeoning emotions. Each increasingly weighted down by the demands of their lifestyle, until one day Li Mu Bai arrives at Shu Lien's dwelling with an announcement; he's giving up the life of the swordsman, a path that has brought him "as much trouble as glory." As an external gesture of his renouncement, he asks Shu Lien to take his famed sword, the Green Destiny, and deliver it to his friend Sir Te (Sihung Lung). But mere hours after Te first holds the weapon in his hands, a masked bandit snatches it right out from under his nose. As Shu Lien and Mu Bai pursue the thief into the heart of fractious 19th-century Peking, they take Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a rebellious young aristocrat, under their wing, join forces with a renegade police inspector and his daughter (De Ming Wang, Li Li), and cross swords with Jade Fox (Chang Pei-Pei), Mu Bai's mortal enemy and the killer of his master. But perhaps the most insurmountable enemy of all is the volatile passion that threatens to pound a thousand chinks in their carefully constructed armor of honor and restraint...

And your eyes are glazing over. You don't like kung fu movies, do you, Jimmy? Well, at the time of this one's initial release, I was a skeptic. My experience with martial arts cinema was limited to the first Rush Hour picture, which, Oscar success and frenzied critical acclaim aside, was perhaps not the best introduction to the genre. I wasn't exactly clamoring for more martial arts at the time, and so, when my papa offered to take me to the new Ang Lee film, I opted for a second viewing of 102 Dalmatians instead. After Glenn Close dropped her last one-liner and the credits cycled through, I went out to the lobby to meet up with my dad, who had just finished his first viewing ofCrouching Tiger. When I ask him what he thought of the movie, I noticed something very strange; there were tears in his eyes.

"Did somebody die?", I asked, as only a 2nd grader could.

"In the movie", he responded.

"But it's just a movie, right Dad?"

"Yes, but....yes."

That "but" made all the difference. For someone who then considered Tarzan the most absorbing experience of their moviegoing career, the idea that something projected on the silver screen could cause the same tears that welled up when I skinned my knee or lost my homework was a decidedly alien one. There were different kinds of tears, I'd soon learn. Also, different kinds of movies.

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I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a week later, the day before Christmas Eve, in a nearly empty, rarely cleaned theater across from the H-E-B market in Waco, Texas. I'll never forget the location, just like I'll never forget what took place there.

Twenty minutes into the picture, the first fight occurs; Shu Lien vs. the thief. By the light of the moon, Shu Lien chases her mark through down streets, around corners, down crowded alleyways and onto slanted rooftops, until finally, they land in front of the governor's palace.

"Give me the sword, and I'll let you go."

No response. The thief strikes a blow, Shu Lien counters. Tan Dun's percussive score kicks into overdrive, and so does the skirmish. Shu Lien lobs bundles, dust, bits of brick, anything she can get her hands on. The thief easily outpaces its rival without even employing the stolen sword. Clearly outmatched physically, Shu Lien places all her bets on a triumph of intellect, trapping the thief in a cramped corner. Then, a deluge of darts, fired directly at her neck; whoever this thief is, they aren't working alone. The thief breaks free of Shu Lien's grip, and, in a single fluid motion that puts the Wachowski Brothers to shame, scales the wall and soars over the palace roof into the dead of night.

When the masked bandit embarked on that first leap of faith, my imagination leapt up with her, and a lifelong love of the movies was born.

It is entirely appropriate that the most frequently discussed characteristic of Crouching Tiger is the vivifying disdain it shows for our pre-established laws of gravity; this is perhaps the most obvious example of the artistic autonomy that sets this apart from most other genre pictures and imbues it with a great deal more importance than most critics or casual filmgoers generally ascribe to it. This is one of the more daring films of the last decade, but its rebellion is quiet; like Written on the Wind, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, or even The Pajama Game (it wasn't every day two unmarried folks slept together in the 50's), it disassembles the barricades of genre convention so stealthily that it's only after a second or third viewing we noticed the paradigms have fallen. Actually, the picture doesn't so much wipe out the action-movie blueprint so much as alter the architecture a bit.

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"Why do you cry?" These four words, spoken by The Terminator to John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, provided one of the great false hopes of movie history. Judgement Day was an absolute sensation when it hit theaters in 1991. The groundbreaking special effects and visionary production design were lauded, but what really made the movie stick-and indeed, it still "sticks" to this day-is the way it mixes gung-ho shootouts with the kind of unforced sensitivity you'd expect in an awards-season pieces. There was hope that Cameron's tour de force would usher in an age where CGI techniques and time-tested analog tricks could be used in service of a damn good story, not just a quickie fix for action junkies.

But the hope proved an empty one, for the ascension of ripped, raging robo-warriors like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal drowned out all remaining strains of Cameron's popcorn poignancy with cacophonous mayhem and zero technique, excluding physical prowess. Films like Under Siege and The Quest played like instructional workout videos, albeit with gun-toting body guards instead of weight machines. It was an era of obsessive masculinity, one where the attention afforded to the minutiae of every explosion and roundhouse kick left emotion out in the cold. How else to explain the success of Keanu Reeves?

"I didn't feel the bliss of enlightenment. Instead... I was surrounded by an endless sorrow." 2000. Li Mu Bai utters this sentence, and swiftly turns the tables on a decade of mindless, often badly choreographed and even worthless action cinema. It's fifteen minutes into this kung-fu film, and we've spent almost all of that time sitting with Shu Lien and Mu Bai at a table, listening to the ladder espouse his deep discomfort with the way of the warrior. This film will be taking its time, the scene tells us. The story is not serving the action...the action is serving the story.

What other martial arts movie uses a civil tea party to uncloak the diseased social strata of its setting? When was the last time an all-out fistfight was followed by an almost Bergman-esque mirror shot of two women preparing for bed? What Jet Li or Sonny Chu movie spends its last 15 or so minutes in a disconsolate state of deep-seated regret? If audiences hadn't responded so strongly to such a blatantly unconventional genre film, Hollywood wouldn't likely have greenlit so many of the big-budget smashes that define the last decade; with Crouching Tiger, there would be noMaster and Commander, The Dark Knight, Kingdom of Heaven, Casino Royale, or maybe even Munich. Emotionally potent action films currently in production at the time of Crouching Tiger's release (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, AIand From Hell to a lesser degree) got a significant promotional push once studio suits noted the public's appetite for this type of fare. Hell, this one's influence was international; similar and often equally impressive releases likeBrotherhood of the Wolf and Hero were imported from around the world. Crouching Tiger made it okay for mythic heroes to shed both blood and tears, restored equilibrium to the thinking-man's action movie, and left its mark on mainstream fare for years to come.

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It is also interesting to note the globality of this picture, both behind and in front of the camera. At the helm is Ang Lee, who frequently cites The Virgin Spring as a major influence but also notes that he is fueled by "novels of derring-do I read instead of doing my homework." It is this interplay between prestige and penny dreadfuls, between his hometown of China and his long-loved New York, between Western highbrow and Eastern lowbrow, that make Lee's work so interesting to watch, and also, I think, mark him as one of our greatest living directors.

He takes elements of camp and approaches them with the respect due eternal art; in The Ice Storm, he takes a feverishly sexual, overtly theatrical story worthy of Douglas Sirk, then turns down the volume and works from a notably restrained visual palette, effectively putting the focus on the characters instead of the absurdity of their circumstances.

In Brokeback Mountain, he starts with a tale innately bound to American politics, then makes his story universal by placing an inordinate amount of trust in silence, in what is unspoken, in the eyes of his actors-all distinctive traits of Asian filmmakers like Ozu and Mizogochi.

And with Crouching Tiger, in addition to paying homage to great studio directors like David Lean and Michael Curtiz (that last scene between Shu Lien and Mu Bai calls to mind Casablanca, no?) he lifts the traditional Western characteristics of individualism and rebellion and carefully, cannily applies them to a decidedly Eastern tale of sacrifice and chastity. Indeed, the trifecta of Jen, Shu Lien, and Mu Bai could almost be seen as a direct representation of this culture clash; Jen stumbles as she casts off her aristocratic duties with the brazen heedlessness of a Western youth, while Shu Lien and Mu Bai collapse under their devotion to theirs. Two extremes. Lee seems to be telling us that the key to harmony lies somewhere in between.
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All these qualities-the pictures' bravery, its technical accomplishment, its astute cultural commentary-make it interesting. But what makes it a masterpiece, and one of my favorite films of all time, is simply what's on the surface. Every scene throbs with the elemental, electric power of great cinema. Shu Lien's first ride into bustling Peking, the aforementioned rooftop skirmish, the revelation of the bandit, the 20-minute desert flashback, Mu Bai and Jen's chase atop swaying bamboo trees, and the final, devastating pair of confrontations between two sets of doomed lovers-I list these indelible moments as an incantation against all that is false in modern cinema, all that is shoddy and opportunistic, all that defiles the moving image for a quick buck. "It's a feeling akin to seeing Peter Pan fly for the first time or watching the first light-saber duel in Star Wars", says critic Judith Egerton of seeing this movie for the first time, and she's not being hyperbolic in the least. Crouching Tiger has allowed so many to believe in the power of movies again, and it helped me to believe in them for the very first time.