I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but... Wondrous!

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2000)

There's a telling moment near the beginning of Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
In closeup, we see the rough-hewn, heavy wooden wheels of a peasant cart. They nestle in deep ruts worn into the stone paving blocks of a roadway entering a gated city. The cart rumbles on, its wheels fitting perfectly into the grooves worn by unspoken centuries of just such passing wagons...in one image we see how tradition creates its own paths, how contemporary reality is fabricated to fit such traditions... The camera rises, we see an almost impossible panorama of Peking, the Forbidden City spreading out before us like an Oz extending to the horizon.
What a film this is. Everything you've heard is right. It may not be the most wondrous thing ever...but it is a superb action adventure romance with terrific acting and a much-welcome heart...that also has some absolutely breath-taking action scenes. "Crouching Tiger...", I am told, is representative of a specific literary/cinematic genre in China: Wu Xia...the wizard/warrior piece...magic and martial arts blended.
I'm not familiar with the form, but the world portrayed here is a breathtakingly fantastical one. The story is putatively set in 19th century China, but it could be anywhere, anywhen. It is a place of high honor and deep feelings, a place where people are bound by traditions and held captive by their forms. It is also a place of wild and mythic landscapes...from stark desert (thought nowhere do we get that featureless, wide-screen linear horizon seen in David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia!") to magic misty green mountains with deep dark lakes and steeply cascading streams that come braiding, tumbling down the rockslide heights. High, reedy bamboo forests wave, wondrous, in the winds.
In this world people may do amazing things. The flying in this movie -- properly called "wire work" in film terms -- is fantastic. This technique, of course, was not invented by the Washowski's but the choreographer of "Crouching Tiger..." also staged the wire-fights of "Matrix." Here, the ability of our warrior heros and villains to climb walls, to leap to the rooftops and soar from building to building -- not to mention engaging each other in aerial combat that soars from the peak of a mountain top to the rocks of a mountain stream in a single take -- or to duel on the very tips of dipping, waving bamboo trees -- looks almost plausible, just over the border of the possible, at least. The guy with whom I saw the advance screening and I...the whole packed-in audience at the big theater at Pipers Alley...burst into spontaneous applause several times throughout... At other moments, I found myself in absolute weepy transport. As I think of the fight in the treetops, right now, I become all drippy -- tingly of eye and sinus.
Apart from anything, this is a grand story! It has passion...love, revenge...it expresses deep need and longing.
And, yes, the woman are the action hearts of the film! Michelle Yeoh is wonderful...but I've been in semi-love with her for a long time. Here, she is more mature, quieter, wiser than anything I've seen her in (she was a recent "Bond Girl"). Her performance is strong and moving, her face registering, magically, a range of conflicting emotions, hidden secrets, crouching angers, all at once.
Chow Yun Fat, too...I've been a fan of his since I first discovered John Woo's Hong Kong crime thrillers...is the best I've ever seen, as well...magnificent in his silences. Strength without cruelty.
The center of the film...remarkably...is a girl who looks to be about 15! Ziyi Zhang whose date of birth is given as 1979. Zhang is from Beijing, China, and has only one other film credit. I say that she is remarkable because her story is the binding element of the film. And she holds the film together! Holding her own with Yeoh and Chow in both the dramatic material and in the balletic martial pas de deus (okay...did I spell that right?) that frame the conflicts between them. She is the "Luke Skywalker" of the piece, if you will...though "Crouching Tiger..." has everything the "Star Wars" saga had: excitement, thrills and magic, but here, it is wrapped in those things Lukas film wanted to give, but succeeded in delivering in only the most self-conscious way: heart and deep-placed spirit.
By the way: this is an action film, almost uniquely without violence...or, rather, the violence is so stylized, so removed into some mystical realm, that it almost disappears into dance. There is, I believe, only one small splash of blood onscreen. Typically, I don't like that -- figuring that if you're going to do a film where violence is part of it all, where action advances plot, let's have it full-bore, the "Full Peckinpaw," if you will. Here, however, this stylization works beautifully!
While there are those who might grumble that Jackie Chan (another favorite of mine) does it all for real, without wires and trick photography...okay...true enough... But here that exuberance of motion is put in service of a grand story and strong characters who carry worthwhile burdens of emotions!
So there. Enough? Just go see it.
I can't wait for the DVD! I'll probably see it again, maybe see it twice again, before it hits the home-market.