“I got what I wished for”: The polarising Ang Lee movie designed to provoke audiences
Being born and educated in Taiwan before continuing his studies in the United States gave Ang Lee one foot in each world, a sentiment he applied to his filmmaking career from the very beginning before ultimately deciding Hollywood was where his future lay.
The director may have only helmed one of his 14 features to date entirely in the country of his birth, 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman, but the culture clash was pivotal to his early work. His debut, Pushing Hands, follows an elderly Chinese expat struggling to adapt to life in New York, while The Wedding Banquet is a rom-com in which a gay Taiwanese man marries a Chinese woman to keep his parents happy.
For his first full-blown mainstream picture, a Jane Austen adaptation wasn’t what anyone expected from an international auteur, but the star-studded Sense and Sensibility nonetheless earned seven Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and a win for Emma Thomspon for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
Intimate period drama The Ice Storm and western Ride with the Devil continued showcasing Lee’s versatility before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon elevated him to the next level. A rousing wuxia epic shot with modern style, it was a critical and commercial sensation that gave the director the freedom to make whatever he wanted for his hotly anticipated follow-up.
Once again defying convention, he plumped for a CGI-laden comic book adaptation, with Lee so invested in the technological advancements required to bring 2003’s Hulk to life that he squeezed himself into the unflattering grey leotard and performed the majority of the title character’s motion capture work.
Ironically, Lee had turned down an offer to take the reins on Brokeback Mountain because he wanted to make Hulk, only to circle back around to the literary adaptation when his dalliance with superheroism didn’t go according to plan. While the film had visual panache and editing ingenuity to spare, it failed to live up to expectations at the box office and split opinion straight down the middle.
“After Crouching Tiger, I wanted to do something really ambitious,” he told the BBC. “I got what I wished for, which provoked a lot of anger and left me exhausted. Actually, I was very tired and felt like I wanted to retire.” Hulk wasn’t an easy movie to make logistically, but it turned out it was so draining Lee was ready to wash his hands of cinema altogether.
Lee made a family drama defined by generational trauma that carried a comic book aesthetic, but people are always going to be disappointed when a blockbuster about a giant green rage monster doesn’t feature all that much action. He was self-aware enough to know it was divisive, even if it left him so knackered he was ready for retirement.
