SINCE HIS 2006 win of the Best Director Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain, followed again in 2013 by a second Best Director Academy Award for Life of Pi, Ang Lee’s position in world cinematic history has been firmly established; he is now considered one of the world’s leading directors. From the beginning, his career has been one of surprises. Since his earliest beginnings, with the Chinese trilogy of Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, he has explored the themes of cultural identity and globalization with unabashed honesty. In these films, Lee probes the dilemma of the “father figure” with unflinching intensity that foreshadows his sensitive handling of future controversial topics. In his second “trilogy” of English-language films, he deals with opposition and resolution in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, fragmented identities and “cubist” narrative in The Ice Storm, and race, gender, class, and cultural identity in the American Civil War drama Ride with the Devil. These films each represent a brave foray into uncharted territory for the director, from his nuanced rendition of Jane Austen’s Britain, to his take on Connecticut suburbia during Watergate and Vietnam, to a bemused look at the Confederate side of the Civil War. The release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 was a stunning critical and commercial success; following on its heels was the film about the ultimate outsider, Hulk (expected to be a blockbuster, but considered his only major commercial failure). Following that was Brokeback Mountain, a film that literally changed history. No one could anticipate his next three choices: Lust/Caution, an unexpected return to his Chinese roots, Taking Woodstock, a look at 1960s hippie culture and a return to the topic of homosexuality, and finally, his most recent film Life of Pi, a spiritual journey in 3D that again propelled Lee into new challenges and risks.
Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was unquestionably the most stunning reversal of the director’s career thus far. Following the discouraging experience of making Hulk, Lee returned to make what he considered a small-budget art-house film that, to everyone’s surprise, quickly became a global cultural phenomenon. Annie Proulx, author of the original short story, was skeptical when she first heard Lee was being considered as a possible director for the film version of Brokeback Mountain. She reminisces in an essay about their first meeting:
They were suggesting Ang Lee as the director, and I thought, here we go again. Could a Taiwanese-born director, probably a thorough-going urbanite, who had recently re-created the Hulk, understand Wyoming and the subterranean forces of the place? [ … ] I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee despite his reputation as brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps insurmountable? We smiled and made small talk for a while and then, reassured by something in his quietness, I said that I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places and that I feared the film would not follow that path. He said that he was afraid, too, that it would be extremely difficult to make into a film. He said he had recently lost his father. I remembered from my mother’s death a few years earlier the vast hole in the world that opened and could not be pulled closed. I had a glimmering that Ang Lee might use his sorrow creatively, transferring a personal sense of loss to this film about two men for whom things cannot work out, that he might be able to show the grief and anger that builds when we must accept severe emotional wounding. I felt we both knew that this story was risky and that he wanted to take the story on, probably for the creative challenge and perhaps (though he didn’t say so) for the gasping euphoria when you get into unknown but hard-driving imaginative projects. However slender, there was a positive connection.1
Ang Lee’s relationship to “the father” is the leitmotif of his work. In each of his films, he revisits the theme of the father; even in the films that are not overtly father-centered, Lee never stops dealing subconsciously with the issue. He said in 2005, “All through my work, I always tend to think that making films was a way of getting away from my past, but you always end up going back to your roots. You try to get as far away as you can, but somehow you always come back. That is the impact of my father.”2 While this is most apparent in Lee’s early Chinese-language Father-Knows-Best trilogy, as well as his presentation of Kevin Kline’s flawed patriarch in The Ice Storm and Nick Nolte’s mad-scientist father in Hulk, each of Ang Lee’s films shows this influence. For example, in the opening scene of Sense and Sensibility, the family patriarch’s death impacts the entire course of the film and the Dashwood family’s future. Absence of the father in Lust/Caution, who abandons his daughter after his immigration and remarriage in England, also deeply affects the Electra-complex relationship that is the center of the film. The father’s presence is a strong force to be grappled with in Taking Woodstock as the son deals with his own identity issues—in this film, it is the ultimate acceptance—and in Life of Pi, as teenage Pi contends with his father’s atheistic rationalism versus his own faith. In Ride with the Devil, Jake Roedel’s father image is not his own father—it is his friend Jack Bull Chiles’ father, who is the master of the property and the true patriarchal figure in that film. In a more indirect and psychologically complex way, Li Mu Bai is a father figure to young Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And finally, there is the long shadow cast by the father to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, who, in the film’s shocking flashback, treats his son to an early exposure of bigotry and hatred that haunts him for the rest of his life. Looking back at the father theme in each of his films in 2005 while making Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee said: “I never really stopped dealing with [the theme of the father]. … Making a movie can really hurt. But unless it hurts, you don’t usually get anything fresh.”3
The films of Ang Lee as a whole are characterized by silence, which emphasizes emotional repression with a spare and severe beauty. This is what gives his films—Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, and Life of Pi (the most silent of Lee’s films, essentially an extended “conversation” between a boy and a tiger in which the tiger cannot speak)—such a lyrical, meandering quality. The camera does not impose itself on the narrative; it does not so much “tell” the story as let it unfold. A subtle glance or a glare of passion are silent signifiers through which the viewer can construct the underlying meaning of the narrative. This demonstrates that the language of the films of Ang Lee is more visual than verbal. Through these visual signifiers, the viewer is drawn into the drama as a participant, as Roland Barthes explains, actively engaging in the construction of a “writerly” text, in contrast to the “readerly” texts on display in traditional Hollywood movies and conventional literature, which proffer easily-understood meanings and allow the viewer a more passive role as an observer.4 This also explains why Ang Lee’s films lodge in the memory so powerfully and become a part of the viewer’s own sense of nostalgia. James Agee wrote:
And so in this quiet introit, and in all the time we have stayed in this house, and in all we have sought, and in each detail of it, there is so keen, sad, and precious a nostalgia as I can scarcely otherwise know; a knowledge of brief truancy into the sources of my life, whereto I have no rightful access, having paid no price beyond love and sorrow.5
This ineffable sense of nostalgia colors the viewer’s own memory, in which the filmic world of Ang Lee lingers far beyond the viewing experience. Some of these unforgettable scenes include: a father carrying his teenage daughter through a gray, bare forest; a mournful Hulk hanging pathetically from a fighterjet’s fuselage before plummeting back to earth; an impossible battle at the top of a green bamboo grove; two chairs drawn side by side observed in a lingering gaze by the camera; the slap of a newspaper on a front step; the silent sadness on Jack’s face as Ennis undresses and bathes just beyond his line of vision; Richard Parker’s unceremonious parting with Pi which haunts him in memory; Mr. Yee’s devastation as he contemplates the rumpled sheets on the bed after the death of his lover; Piu Piu glancing back over her shoulder at the Statue of Liberty, which represents the freedom she longs for but which (for her) remains out of reach.
Lee’s films’ transcendence of cultural and gender boundaries—as well as language barriers—leads to a unique “transcendence” in his films. As noted, one of the challenges that Ang Lee presents is his categorization within national or transnational cinema, Chinese or Hollywood cinema, independent art-house or big-budget blockbuster. Lee resists easy categorization; his position in world cinema underscores the slippery terrain of modern academic terminology, as well as shifting conceptualization of national identity in a globalized society. One thing is certain, however: he brings a Chinese sensibility to his films which adds uniquely to their transcendence. Lee’s dramas do not aim for a standard Hollywood “happy ending.” On the whole, Chinese dramas do not reach such a state of “closure”—there is a much greater tolerance of unresolved sadness and pain. This is why his films, with this Chinese aesthetic, have such an appeal to the Hollywood-saturated English-speaking world. He brings the tension of unresolved tragedy to his work in, for example, the ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in which the viewer is not informed whether the female lead lives or dies, or the ending of Brokeback Mountain which leaves the main character with unresolved heartache in a dilapidated trailer home. Lee carries this unresolved tension, which is an element of Chinese sensibility, into his films and makes it accessible and appealing to the non-Chinese viewer. The phrase “huai jiu” or “nostalgia for the past” is a big part of the melancholic element in Chinese culture. The Chinese sense of the word “nostalgia” is not quite the same as the Western meaning; the word “nostalgia” in Chinese carries with it an almost unbearable yearning, a sense of unfulfilled desire—in other words, a longing for things to be not as they are. This nostalgic yearning characterizes Chinese art and literature, especially poetry.
Ang Lee ends his 2002 Chinese-language autobiography, “A Ten-Year Dream of Cinema,” with the text of an English poem entitled “The Dreame” by seventeenth-century poet Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare. “The Dreame” with music by Patrick Doyle was also performed by Jane Eaglen over the Sense and Sensibility end titles. The fact that this literary work appears twice in Ang Lee’s oeuvre demonstrates the importance of this particular poem to the director. Below is the poem’s text.
The Dreame
Or Scorne, or pittie on me take,
I must the true Relation make,
I am undone to Night;
Love in a subtile Dreame disguis’d,
Hath both my heart and me surpris’d,
Whom never yet he durst attempt t’ awake;
Nor will he tell me for whose sake
He did me the Delight,
Or Spight,
But leaves me to inquire,
In all my wild desire
Of sleepe againe; who was his Aid,
And sleepe so guiltie and afraid,
As since he dares not come within my sight.
Like the desire that “dares not come within my sight” in this poem, Lee’s films express the unknown and unrealized desires of the heart. He uses the example of Marianne, who loved not Willoughby but the fascination of her own romantic interest in him; and Jen, who leapt into the clouds into an unknown state, caught in an endless reverie, preferring this to her real-life lover, Lo. Lee uses this poem as a metaphor to express his own experience of living in the “world of film,” the “world within the screen.” For Ang Lee, film is like a “subtile Dream disguis’d,” the elusive and fleeting sense captured by Jonson’s poem.
He closes his book “A Ten-year Dream of Cinema” with these words: “I would like to live inside the film and observe the world from the other side of the screen—perhaps it is even more beautiful.”6