I don’t know who wrote the introductory press release for director Wayne Wang, but I really like this sentence:
“Wang’s career has been a saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience: immigrant beginnings, rapid education and acculturation, immersion in ethnic politics, pioneering of the low-budget DIY ethic, Hollywood success and now a renewed return to roots.”
That sounds just about perfect. One can think of a number of Hollywood directors — Steven Soderbergh, maybe — who have oscillated wildly between big-budget crowd-pleasers and looser, more experimental films. Wang’s career is one that similarly includes entire casts of non-professional actors on one hand, and Susan Sarandon, Jeremy Irons and Queen Latifah on the other.
A beginner can approach Wang’s career arc from either direction and perhaps be genuinely surprised: “He directed this?” It’s a seemingly wobbly trajectory that includes the ensemble drama Smoke (and its companion film Blue in the Face), the magisterial Chan Is Missing, from 1982 (an indie film well before Soderbergh’s own debut indie sex, lies and videotape came out in 1989), and a more recent slew of films that may have been dismissed as Hollywood lint. Less generous folks, not including myself, would see this as an unfortunate decline. For many others, J-Lo and Ralph Fiennes headlining your movie is just about as successful as you can get.
This might, in fact, remind you of one particular Asian director, and let me digress here for a moment by introducing it with a snippet of conversation I heard recently at the theater, said by one audience member to another, while waiting for Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska to begin:
“I don’t know what The Princess of Nebraska is about, but I sure liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
There’s a lesson here somewhere, but I don’t think it was learned; I just didn’t have the heart to turn around and correct the woman, whose friend didn’t know any better.
However, I think the comparison with Ang Lee is instructive, and not just because they’re both of Asian descent: a film career beginning in small-scale family dramas (Pushing Hands, Eat Drink Man Woman, and even The Ice Storm, perhaps his masterpiece), commercial and critical success, then a seemingly inexplicable turn to a Civil War romance with Jewel (Ride with the Devil, which wasn’t too bad) and a comic book movie better served by a cheesy television series (Hulk).
Where this “saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience” doesn’t apply pertains to Wang’s formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late sixties and seventies, and I can only imagine it would just about mark anyone who had lived through that. It’s the “immersion in ethnic politics” that differentiates Wayne Wang most sharply.
It’s unlikely that Lee — and not just because of their different backgrounds — would have made something like Chan Is Missing. It’s a film that I’d like to think was not only forged from the activism of the late ’60s, but had been released in the early ’80s precisely because little in the intervening years had filled the gap between what Asian Americans had demanded during the early years of the Asian American Movement and what they still saw on the big screen. (Indeed, precious little in the intervening years between 1982 and now has fulfilled the promise of Chan Is Missing either, in terms of Asian American cinema. There, I said it.)
Chan Is Missing also happens to be one of the finest films about San Francisco (and not just set in San Francisco -– though arguably Vertigo couldn’t have been set anywhere else), a film about “the real San Francisco”, one even more keenly observant as Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), about Native Americans in Los Angeles. But it’s also a film, its unique cinematic qualities aside, that was also intended as a political riposte to the demeaning roles (or the very absence of them) Asian American actors found themselves cast in. (Chan Is Missing is, formally, a detective movie, and it’s an explicit reference to Charlie Chan -– who, in his various incarnations for over eight decades, was mostly played by white actors in yellowface).
Let me make another digression, this time about Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985). About a year and a half ago I was showing his movie to my Asian American Culture students at San Francisco State University, and I thought it would be interesting to invite one of its two lead performers, Laureen Chew, to come speak to my class. (She also happened to be my Associate Dean, at the College of Ethnic Studies, and had her office a few doors down.)
I was ready with all my filmgeek questions on improvisation and editing and the film’s motifs, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what Laureen was going to say. It isn’t often that I, or my students, have an almost one-on-one audience with a genuine movie actress. (There’s nothing like seeing someone on the big screen a few minutes before that person suddenly materializes in front of you, and the look on the students’ faces showed it.)
What Laureen did was something else: an inspiring and intensely personal look at her life, crammed with anecdotes. (The only thing I could think of, at the end of her talk, was that I and the class had received an unexpected, genuine gift.) She talked about her involvement in the Third World Strike (and her arrest and subsequent jail time), the movie’s semi-autobiographical aspects and her relationship with her mother, and the making of Dim Sum as a deeply political act with respect to its envisioned audience and the history of Asian Americans in film.
It’s this last part that surprised me the most, actually – though it shouldn’t have, as I was teaching an Ethnic Studies class, after all. Dim Sum is a quiet film about a mother and daughter and the relationship between filial obligation and marriage, and there seemed little that was “political” about it.
But of course, Laureen was right: the very fact that the film, actually depicting Asian women as rich and complex human beings, existed at all was, in 1985, a clear political statement, and it is perhaps also in this light that Wang’s career should be viewed. The fact that Dim Sum is also a beautiful, finely-observed movie — something of an homage to Ozu as well — makes it even more compelling. We still need political acts like these, particularly for people who can’t tell one Asian surname from another.
So I’m pleased to write that Wang’s two latest films, from 2007 – A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska – are both very fine returns to form, simultaneously a revisiting of and an elaboration on former cinematic themes explored in his first two major films. What “a saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience” indeed.
(A Thousand Years of Good Prayers [trailer on YouTube] will be opening at the Clay in San Francisco on September 26, and The Princess of Nebraska [trailer on YouTube] will be released on YouTube on Oct. 17. Both also played the festival circuit -– the former film opened the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival -– before this upcoming general release.)
[Tooting my own horn here: on one of my other blogs, I have reviews of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska.]