“Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” (2000)
Tail somewhat between his legs after “Ride WIth The Devil,” Lee returned to Taiwan for his next film, and triumphed, with his most successful film up to that point, and one that firmly launched the next act of his career. Once more turning to literary source material, in this case the “Crane Iron Pentalogy” by Wang Dulu (and more specifically the fourth book in the series), “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” was Lee’s take on the martial arts genre, melding the instinct for character and emotion he’d displayed across his work with kung-fu action courtesy of Yuen-Woo Ping, who’d come to international fame with his work on “The Matrix” the previous year. The plot sees warriors Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) on the trail of a stolen sword, the Green Destiny, taken by the evil Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei) and her young apprentice Jen (Zhang Ziyi). It’s epic, soaring stuff, and very much a traditional wuxia tale, but Lee brings contemporary sensibilities to it, with strong female characters and an arthouse feel. Not that the action isn’t cracking, because it is; the fight scenes are among the best genre, even if some of the superpowered leaping doesn’t quite hold up on second viewings. And it should be said that the structure doesn’t quite work, the extended flashback romance between Jen and bandit Lo (Chang Chen) stopping the film dead in its tracks for twenty minutes or so. But it’s the lovely performances (particularly by Yun-fat and Yeoh, playing out a sort of wu-shu version of “Howard’s End“), the very deep vein of feeling, and the stunning photography by Peter Pau that really linger after the fact. The film was a monumental success, earning ten Oscar nominations, and becoming the most successful foreign-language film ever in the U.S, and it put Lee on the top of many studio wishlists. For better or for worse… [B+]
“Hulk” (2003)
In an era of interchangeable superhero adventures, “Hulk,” which came towards the end of that first wave of 21st century movies in the genre, still stands as something genuinely different. Eschewing the typical structure and action beats of the superhero movie, the film instead turns the psychological and physiological freak-out of scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), Lee’s most repressed character in a career full of them, into a kind of grotesque Greek Tragedy, while emphasizing the pop art sensibilities of the comic book medium. For better or worse, stylistically the film was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. In particular, the way that Lee would parcel up the frame into “panels,” turning the whole thing into a living comic book, remains a shocking, unparalleled stylistic flourish amidst a sea of blandly spruced-up epics. (And by all accounts this was the tamest version of “Hulk” Lee fashioned. A New York Times story that came out around the same time as “Hulk” quoted someone close to the production as saying, “You thought that was weird, you should have seen it six months ago.”) While “Hulk” doesn’t completely work – the pacing suffers due to a lack of forward momentum and conflict, plus sometimes Lee’s editorial tics become distractingly odd – it is a movie overflowing with personality, with lots to love (Nick Nolte, as Banner’s father, memorably chews the scenery). And what other comic book movie in recent memory has something as flat-out bizarre as Nolte turning into a giant jellysfish? [B]
“Brokeback Mountain” (2005)
Some would say the tone of Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” is elegiac, beautifully tragic and timeless, the time period of the ’70s and ’80s set aside to present a mild west where cowboys are forever retreating to explore their deep longing. Others would blast the sheepish refusal of topicality, given that “Brokeback Mountain” (which won Lee the Best Director Oscar) manages to be a watershed film in queer cinema without a character once uttering the word “gay.” Lee’s obliviousness towards the legacy of gay cinema does indeed lead to a narrative where one of the two men refuses to acknowledge their own natural orientation in favor of a single true love, one that follows the popular formula where homosexuals must always be punished in some ways for their identity. But it’s also impossible to miss how Lee shatters the hetero-normative idea of a bucking cowboy with beautiful, square-jawed Ennis, brought to life by a titanic performance by the late Heath Ledger. The legacy of this film amongst the simple-minded will likely turn to jokes and mimicry of Jake Gyllenhaal’s fey Jack Twist (an affecting turn unfortunately susceptible to casual mockery), but Lee lands a strong punctuation mark in a carnival sequence where Ennis defends his family from a couple of drunken hooligans, displaying protective fury before basking in an all-American tableau of his eyes hidden underneath a cowboy hat, fireworks blasting in the background. [A-]