She was seen as a technical artist: a great stunt woman, but not a great actress. Any press she particularly received for Crouching Tiger was more focused on her high kicks than her deeply moving work. However, the reception of Yeoh’s performance in Crouching Tiger was completely different from that of Everything Everywhere All At Once. In this critic’s opinion, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is her finest and most nuanced work: the performance she should have won the Oscar for. Yeoh is the titanic presence animating Crouching Tiger: just one viewing will make you wonder why Everything Everywhere All At Once, the film she just conquered awards season with, became the revelatory moment of her career. Crouching Tiger is bursting with excellent actors–particularly Michelle Yeoh’s formidable and disciplined Yu Shu Lien. This makes it even more stunning that he had a cast that could do both: death defying stunts and Shakespearean emotion. The result is a story propelled to new emotional heights by its fantastical action. As they seek out freedom, they literally soar above the earth. Crouching Tiger prioritizes the desire of women to carve out autonomy for themselves, whatever the cost. It’s also a story with slightly remarkable gender politics considering the male–dominated genre of wuxia. He blended Western drama (he told Michelle Yeoh it was like Sense and Sensibility) with Eastern action. But on top of its high action, Lee also added high drama. Its name comes from the heroes it follows, who could naturally battle to the death in midair and run sideways along buildings. Wuxia, for the uninformed, is a specific Chinese genre. This is because Ang Lee did something with the wuxia genre that no one had before. It still feels like a bold new vision compared to most modern blockbusters, which are supposedly bigger and better, but look more like green screen blobs in comparison. The Hong Kong film industry wasn’t well known to American audiences in the '90s, so when the cast of Crouching Tiger lept into action, gliding over terracotta roofs, rosy desert plains, craggy mountains, and swaying stalks of green bamboo trees, the film was completely groundbreaking to them.
The fight scenes, choreographed by Yuen Woo–ping, may be nothing short of masterful but are really in service of a tale of love, duty, and freedom. Crouching Tiger is driven by the dreams of two women, Jen and Yu Shu Lien, whose true desires remain tantalizingly out of their control. From Sense and Sensibility (1995) to Brokeback Mountain (2005), he probes the human desire to live a life unencumbered by social expectation, by duty, even by gravity. Across an incredible career, Lee has returned again and again to a similar story. Perhaps no director has mastered telling stories of wrenching human desire for lives they cannot lead like Ang Lee. Lee took, in his own words, "a B movie" and turned it into a mythic tale of forbidden love, feminist desire, and sweeping balletic action. The story is a breathtaking swirl of romance and revenge, following a mysterious young woman who steals a famous sword from its famous warrior. But Crouching Tiger transcends it is wuxia, and everything else piled on. It was never certain that American audiences would fall for a wuxia film with all Asian actors and all dubbed dialogue.
The film is an adaptation of an old Chinese wuxia novel-not exactly box office gold. Lee and company were making what should have been a blip on the radar of some dedicated film lovers in the United States. Rewatching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a reminder of how extraordinary an achievement it is. This is because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is much more than just a martial arts movie: It supersedes genre conventions and soars above them, but that isn’t how we tend to remember it. The film became the highest grossing non–English–language film in the U.S., earning ten Oscar nominations and a permanent place in the cultural zeitgeist. When released in December 2000, it earned a shocking $128 million dollars ($218 million today!). “I didn’t realize I was upgrading a B–movie to A.”Ĭrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a lot more than an A–worthy film. “I wanted it all,” Lee told Entertainment Weekly.
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He realized that when deciding between making an action movie or a drama, he chose both. Two years ago, during the 20th anniversary of the stone–cold classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee pondered how his sweeping epic had come to be.
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