For my money, I loooooved the flick. This will be the first movie I review when I get back around to updating my site regularly in the next few days.
One element worth discussing (and that will play a major part in my full-length review): Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is very much in the mold of wuxia, which is a traditional heroic Chinese storytelling form. The “by-the-numbers” comment above sort of captures it, in that wuxia is constructed out of a lot of “off-the-shelf” parts. (This is a simplification, so to any Chinese purists, I apologize in advance.)
To illustrate: You’ve got the “magical <object>,” a weapon or a paintbrush or an actual person; here it’s a sword. You’ve got the “avenge <role model>,” e.g. the bad guy killed the father or brother or teacher or whomever; here it’s the hero’s master. You’ve got mistaken identities, disguises, and so on. Wuxia stories will pull a handful of these standardized elements out of the toolbox, mix and match, and voila, you’ve got a story. (In fact, one of the truly fun aspects of CTHD is just how many of these ingredients have been mixed in; it’s like a feast of plot devices, shovelful after shovelful of wuxia elements, all crammed into one movie.) Naturally, in the U.S., we’ve got several corresponding forms; romance novels and cop stories are the obvious examples.
Most of the time, wuxia stories seem awfully cheesy to a Western (particularly American) audience, because we haven’t grown up with that storytelling tradition. The aforementioned cop story will work fine, even if it’s just as prefab, because we’re used to it. However, if you’ve seen three or four low-budget kung fu movies, it may seem to you like they’re all the same. In a superficial way, they are, as described above, because they’re all built from the same mix-and-match elements: How many times can Yu Wang, as the One-Armed Swordsman, go after a bunch of evil monks who have killed his latest teacher? These stories work much better for a Chinese audience, because although the plots are all superficially structurally similar, and they’re watching for the subtle differences in execution as presented in a familiar framework. Americans and other Westerners, though, tend to dismiss them.
What Ang Lee is doing in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is consciously building a film in the wuxia tradition. The big difference, though, is that he’s giving the prefab elements the emotional weight and resonance that’s usually ignored in the Chinese versions, which work in shorthand. The unrequited love story, the magical super-powerful sword, the noble daughter falling for a thief… all of these would be mentioned quickly and superficially in an ordinary kung-fu movie. But in CTHD, Lee is taking these genre conventions at face value, and really letting the emotions and human realities play out to their fullest, as if for the first time. The effect, to say the least, is remarkable.
Many reviewers are claiming that CTHD may awaken Western interest in the vast library of Eastern martial-arts movies. I don’t think this will happen, simply because, as described above, the majority of these films treat the ingredients of wuxia in shorthand form. Yes, there are a small number of films that do have this kind of resonance, and have achieved cultural crossover (some of Jackie Chan’s early films, for example, or the middle career of Jet Li, notably). But I’m afraid that most of these films, if sought out by Westerners attempting to replicate the experience of CTHD, will fall flat.
I’m curious to hear from other readers who aren’t as familiar with the wuxia tradition, who wouldn’t be as aware of what specifically the movie was doing, to see how well it worked for them.
