For a filmmaker who’s tackled a wide range of genres, from minor-key Chinese-language comedies to epic kung-fu action, from nuanced literary Americana to iconic CGI-driven superheroics, it’s actually relatively easy to spot an Ang Lee film if you know what you’re looking for. Superficially, the Taiwanese-born, American-trained filmmaker has an deeply eclectic and diverse taste in subject matter, setting and even style (one could never imagine that “Sense & Sensibility” and “Hulk” came from the same director from the shooting techniques used alone), but all kinds of thematic links recur across the director’s work — family, repression, duty, thwarted love or desire. Whether it’s 1940s Shanghai or Civil War-era Missouri, you can find the same humanistic concerns, even as the filmmaker finds new things to say about them.
Lee’s latest, the long-awaited adaptation of Yann Martel’s “Life Of Pi,” again sees the director moving into new territory with an effects-heavy, 3D, visually extraordinary adventure that might be the director’s most spiritual film to date (read our A-grade review here). With the movie opening this Wednesday, and looking all but certain to win Lee his third Best Director Oscar nomination (and possibly even his second win), it seemed like a good idea to look over the director’s complete career to date. You can find our verdicts on the first 20 years of Ang Lee films below, and one can only hope there’s plenty more where they came from.
“Pushing Hands” (1992)
Essentially unemployed for years after graduating from NYU, Lee finally got a break in 1990 after two of his screenplays, co-written with regular collaborator James Schamus, placed first and second in a competition organized by the Chinese government. Initially, they refused to fund the winner, “The Wedding Banquet,” because of its gay subject matter, so instead “Pushing Hands” was the one which ended up in production. A gentle culture-clash comedy-drama, the story follows Mr. Chu (future Lee regular Sihung Lung), a t’ai chi instructor who leaves China to live with his son Alex (Bo Z Wang) and his neurotic writer wife Martha (Deb Snyder) in New York. It’s a modest but sweet little film that pits Chu’s traditional family-led values against the harsh, selfish world of the U.S., while also giving him a faltering romance with Taiwanese widower Mrs .Chen (Lai Wang). It is also very much a first film. Lee’s direction is a bit scrappy, the script doesn’t quite cohere, and while Sihung Lung is wonderful, carrying much of the film on his shoulders, Wang and Snyder feel somewhat amateurish. But still, it’s intriguing to see where Lee began, and how the themes of much of his work are already in place so early on. [C+]