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vs Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
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By John Demetry
Director Ang Lee and Producer/Screenwriter James Shameless don't know anything about "true heart" or its corollary, true art. All they know about is marketing: how to make crap fly. Cast Away director Robert Zemeckis and star Tom Hanks, however, have learned plenty about both heart and art. They share their knowledge with the best antidote to that crouching, hidden menace Hollywood has to offer on the big screens right now. It's not a movie to be cast away, but to be embraced, actively learned from. The story is well-known by now (particularly because of the hoopla surrounding Hanks' drastic weight loss). FedEx agent Hanks crashes into the ocean during an emergency call on Christmas Eve. He spends the next four years stranded on an island. The film's wonders, however, have yet to be properly honored. Cast Away makes the best use of its big-budget means to create images that are truly awesome, humbling. Crouching Tiger, however, is merely cheap, flat, exploiting viewers' lack of visual sophistication. Some have called it storybook, but all of Lee's films have this same lack of depth, the same dulled out palette. The establishment of space is awkward, the movement of camera and action void of meaning or coherence. This is true in the dramatic as well as the unconscionably heralded fight sequences (not only sub-The Ghost with White Hair but outclassed by The Matrix). The special effects are as groaning, mechanical as those in Return of the Jedi. The dramatics, just as emotionally bereft. (Think Yoda without the humor.) Even the ability to fly is treated as banal, everyday.
Zhang Zi-Yi and Chow Yun Fat
defy gravity in Ang Lee's Croucing Tiger, Hidden Dragon
In rough terms, Crouching Tiger is to Jedi as Cast Away is to Empire Strikes Back. Just as Irvin Kirshner's rich, vibrant imagery deepened George Lucas' archetypal themes (family, heroism, technology), Zemeckis' give weight, expanse to a common modern emotional dilemma about priorities (work, friendship, love) told in a Robinson Crusoe man-against-nature tale. It signifies a shared pop mythology; the everyday made extraordinary. You can identify Zemeckis' clear-headed connection between dramatics, dialogue, images, and sound and his personal understanding, his personal philosophy. The meaningless, confused fortune-cookie pronouncements of Crouching Tiger, however, mark its essential Euro-centric perspective that exoticizes Eastern culture. Cast Away achieves global breadth in the opening tracking of a FedEx package delivered from the U.S. to Moscow, 1995. Playing on the speed of modern life, Zemeckis parlays details that you might miss (the removal of a Lenin tribute).
Zemeckis, finally, after the embarrassing but instructive failures of Forrest Gump and Contact, combines satire and politics, philosophy and emotions with visual vibrancy. Nature becomes terrifying and beautiful, utterly mysterious. Zemeckis daringly fills the theatre with darkness and the sounds of a storm. A crack of lightning across the screen reveals Hanks in a lifeboat floating on a massive, digitally dazzling wave. The rising overhead crane shot dwarfs Hanks, finding a visual equivalence to a force controlling, manipulating human fate. That humbling power puts human experience into perspective, while signifying its preciousness. The modern world has us all lost at sea. On a cliff at two significant junctures in the film (and another time unseen, but relayed through a profound monologue that shames every subtitle written by Schamus), the camera's overhead shot of Hanks and cliff with land and sea below creates an existential vertigo and genuine, luminescent awe. Sure, Cast Away doesn't have the visionary, cinema-transmogrifying post-modernism of Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train or of Zemeckis' colleague and friend Steven Spielberg's Amistad. (As a friend wrote to me: "Zemeckis isn't the poet Spielberg is.") It's still a heartfelt introduction to those overlooked films' themes of the need to change, with radical imagination, our lives.
Hanks' humanism and dedication takes perceptual form in his willingness to shed pounds, an arduous experience that brings him closer to his characters' on that deserted island. To use actor-speak, performer and character share the same motivation: love (of actor for audience, of character for his romantic partner). What differentiates Hanks from overrated Chow (who ain't no Tony Leung or Leslie Cheung), is his range--awkwardly juggling work and love at the beginning, terror and frustration at first on the island, then loony determination and will, and, finally, a state of grace. This range encapsulates, expresses a complex of emotions with which the audience identifies, while putting it into artistic perspective. Hanks makes sense of our confusions. Chow merely confuses. In Crouching Tiger, he looks at the camera and at co-stars with a zombie stare. I guess we're supposed to understand this as a zen-state (or something); even though we've already learned that his love for Michelle Yeoh has made him discard his meditation (or something). What he lacks, and what Hanks delivers at the end (like Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha) is a sense of mystical wonderment, the joy of existence gained from hard-won (i.e., dramatized) enlightenment.
Both of these films deal with concepts of love and social responsibility. Between them, however, is a chasm of sense and sensibility. Lee's low-angle shot of a nubile female torso stretched backward while being fingered by her bandit lover is mere cynical sensationalism; Zemeckis displays rare honest emotionalism. Lee imbues his "storybook" fable with pseudo-feminism about female liberation, but this timeliness simply marks it as dated misogyny. Maybe it's the dream storybook of lonely film geeks, who get to justify this film's central battle over a phallic sword, which wriggles like a penis becoming erect, by feeling "sensitive." The Green Sword is the film's central visual metaphor for how Lee equates "freedom" with masculinity. This use of genre for supporting doctrinaire ideology is what Cast Away casts away. The best of genre filmmaking deals with modern and timeless themes with tight, entertaining film language - genre shorthand. That's what "Cast Away" accomplishes. It brings the storybook movie adventure images that enchanted us as children into an adult realm with its handling of love. The daring open-ended conclusion of Cast Away finds Hanks at the mythical American crossroads. We share his point of view down each possible path, a technique that challenges conceptions of freedom. It's a challenge to Zemeckis and Hanks for the remainder of their careers, as well as to audiences that stand at the crossroads every time they choose the movie they'll see. It's also the crossroads where Lee and Schamus sold their souls to the marketing devil. |
Ang Lee steered Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to 10 Oscar nominations 
Academy Award-winning Director Robert Zemeckis on the set of Cast Away 
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