The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Xi yan, Taiwan / USA, 106 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Ang Lee, Neil Peng, James Schamus
Photography: Jong Lin
Music: Mader
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Winston Chao, Mitchell Lichtenstein, May Chin, Sihung Lung, Ya-Lei Kuei

The Wedding Banquet is only the second feature by Taiwan director and cowriter Ang Lee, and his first real hit. Lee went on to earn a reputation as a versatile (not to say chameleonic) filmmaker, with an ability to work across many different types of drama, from upholstered period pieces such as Sense and Sensibility to the fantastic martial arts of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the searing family story of Brokeback Mountain. He even made a superhero movie, with Hulk, though it was ultimately drummed out of the larger conceptual framework of the ongoing Marvel universe now unfolding before us, and redone by someone else.

The Wedding Banquet looks in many ways like a beginner's movie. It was a favorite of mine at the time it came out, for its sweetly sentimental resolutions, and I saw it a few times then. Coming back to it again after so much time now I was struck by how much it moves and behaves like a TV movie, the kind of thing you might find on the Lifetime channel. The premise is right out of TV sitcoms, based on misunderstandings and perceived needs to hide information from people, in order to spare their feelings. Even the way it plays out is often marked by broad comic turns, throwing in a pratfall or a character or a line for comic relief, even in the middle of significant action. That's typical TV, especially on sitcoms (and, now, "dramedies"), establishing comic rhythms that break up the action whenever it verges on becoming too serious.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Wo hu cang long, Taiwan / Hong Kong / USA / China, 120 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Du Lu Wang, Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, Kuo Jung Tsai
Photography: Peter Pau
Music: Dun Tan
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Lung Sihung, Cheng Pei-pei, Li Fazeng, Gao Xian, Hai Yan, Wang Deming, Li Li

Director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a project of love if ever there was one—still sits comfortably high on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, some 14 years on. But it seems every time I see this valentine to Lee's origins I like it a little less. Equal parts old-fashioned Hollywood potboiler, newfangled martial arts epic, overindulgent fairy tale, and great swooning romance (make that two great swooning romances), it shows among other things how deeply Lee had embraced the aesthetic of Oscar-bait even then, with its expensive color tones and crane shots, its impressive roster of Asian stars, and its clockwork alternations between ponderous exposition and gripping action scenes.

For balance, for fans, here is Richard Corliss of Time outlining the appeal: "The director convened stars of three movie eras—pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the 1960s, Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen—and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on treetops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative, and it kicks ass."

The Ice Storm (1997)

USA, 112 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Rick Moody, James Schamus
Photography: Frederick Elmes
Music: Mychael Danna
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Henry Czerny, Adam Hann-Byrd, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Jamey Sheridan, Elijah Wood, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Cumpsty, Katie Holmes, Allison Janney, David Krumholtz

I thought The Ice Storm was the movie of the year even back in the day. I had become aware a little earlier of director Ang Lee, originally from Taiwan, with 1993's appealing romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet. He fast established himself as a director of protean ability and wide range with Sense and Sensibility, a decent Merchant/Ivory-style upholstered drama based on Jane Austen, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a martial arts fantasy, and Brokeback Mountain, an epic romance about modern-day gay cowboys. The 2003 Hulk cemented all that, if it needed cementing, though that one has subsequently been dropped down the memory hole, perhaps for the best. I've never seen it.

The Ice Storm is, as advertised, an impressively detailed portrait of bad weather. On a Thanksgiving weekend, two middle-class American families of the '70s with generalized spiritual sickness are doing things that can't be undone, even as a terrible winter storm closes down on them. It's an ensemble piece, involving all eight people from the two families and many others as well, with lots of good players chipping in small, effective turns, delivering strong performances in a swimming sea of faces. I still remember and think of many of them—Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, even Sigourney Weaver and Elijah Wood—chiefly as they appear here.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Canada/USA, 134 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana, Annie Proulx
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Roberta Maxwell, Peter McRobbie

Ang Lee's gay cowboy western romance is an always interesting and often unpredictable mix of the general and the highly specific. First, obviously, it addresses the ways that denial and repression brought on by social pressure and stigmas associated with being gay or otherwise "other," whether internalized or imposed from without, only compound and literally worsen everything for everyone. This falls under the category of "the general," but the picture is highly effective in getting at something that is too often maddeningly elusive, particularly with regard to those who will not see. This, in fact, may be its single greatest strength. Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) meet as two lonely young Westerners scratching out a living in 1963, taking a summer-long job working together in Wyoming tending a herd of sheep. They fall in love, neither one able to handle what has happened to them. "I ain't no queer," Ennis tells Jack the day after their first sexual encounter. "Me neither," says Jack. But this one summer would prove to be the idyll that neither of them could forget, and that both longed to return to for the rest of their lives. After it is over, Ennis will marry his sweetheart Alma a few months later and then father two girls with her. Jack, for his part, knocks around the rodeo circuit awhile before marrying and settling down in Texas. A few years after their summer they are seemingly locked into their life choices. Then Jack looks up Ennis and almost immediately they take up where they left off, and both are overwhelmed and shaken by the depths of their feelings. From then on, even as their families come to suspect them and it leads to numerous problems in their lives, they continue to meet once or twice or three times a year for a few days or a week at a time. It is heartbreaking to watch time escaping them, to see them aging, with both feeling so trapped by their circumstances. And here is where the story becomes highly specific, not just some by-the-numbers quasi-Sirk melodrama of gay love frustrated, but a story of two specific individuals in love, making specific choices and suffering specific consequences. In that regard, though it is to everyone's credit that they attempted it, I have to say I'm not entirely convinced. I don't trust, for one thing, that screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana or director Ang Lee or short story writer Annie Proulx actually know enough to make the movie work on the level of specificity they intend. But that's only hindsight, after multiple viewings began to produce a sneaking feeling of hollowness, and me trying to put my finger on the reasons. I continue to be surprised often by how much of it does work—the performances of Gyllenhaal and particularly Ledger are subtle, complex, and brilliant, it's a beautiful thing to look at, and its heart (and politics) is in the right place, which I count as a plus.