Review 1: Auteur Approach

Ang Lee can be considered an incredibly versatile director—from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to The Hulk  to Brokeback Mountain to Sense and Sensibility. Life of Pi,  after being turned down by director M. Night Shyamalan, became Lee’s twelfth feature film. The versatility of cinematic style makes it hard to view Life of Pi through a formalist lens, and perhaps hard to classify Ang Lee as an auteur despite his incredible success. Though I am not too familiar with his films, though, having only seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I think if we are to consider Lee an auteur we must redefine an auteur as a director with many signatures and styles–or, perhaps Lee would resist classification as an auteur.

That said, Ang Lee won an Academy Award for Best Director for this film (one of four awarded to the film, the other three for cinematography, score, and visual effects). In an interview with ABC News, Lee notes that when he first read the book, “as a filmmaker, I didn’t see it as a movie.”  In the same interview, Lee mentions that Daniel Day Lewis once told him, “You’re really an actor,” referring to his versatility as a director. In another interview with The Guardian, Ang Lee addresses the use of 3D in the film. Calling it a “new deal,” Lee highlights what seems to be one of his primary values: experimentation. His versatility and the way he talks about directing suggest that he is not preoccupied with a particular style or aesthetic, but rather that he is willing to try different techniques as a director. Also, considering the lead actor (Suraj Sharma) had no acting experience before the film, it is a testament also to Lee that the acting was convincing enough to mask Sharma’s lack of experience.

Review 2: Genre Approach

The special effects of Life of Pi were spectacular, and to top it all off the film was shot in 3D. A quarter of the four years spent making Life of Pi was post-production editing. As Lee admits, “It’s very hard to imitate God’s work.” This film meets both the popular and literary ideas of an epic: focusing on the physical journey of Pi across the ocean after a shipwreck in which he loses his entire family and becomes the only representative of humankind out in the oceanic domain, with only a starving tiger for company. At the same time, the film had an astronomical budget of 1.5 million dollars which translated to dizzyingly vibrant and dreamlike visuals of an almost-realistic tiger, marine life, and all the details of water and sky. In contrast to other epics, wherein the landscape is almost always significant but is more of a panoramic stage, Life of Pi animated this backdrop with physical movement and dynamic colors and tones. Considering so much of the film is simply Pi and the tiger adrift on the ocean with no land in sight, I think the incredibly detailed CGI and general animation of the sea and sky really helped engage audiences in a way that was pretty novel. The general feeling about Martel’s book was that it could not be translated to cinema, but Lee managed to capture this journey in a way that was never boring and was totally saturated with tone (be it color or sound) even when dialogue and acting were minimal.

Though for obvious reasons special effects were needed to make this fantastic story a cinematographic reality, I often was bothered by what I felt was an overuse of special effects. I found myself wanting either a more realistic style or, if it had to be exaggerated, then a full-on animation. What is usually achieved with makeup and elaborate props in epic films was done with computers here. However, the story and cinematography of Life of Pi are intertwined in a unique way. As adult Pi tells his story to the writer interviewing him, he reveals that the legal investigators of the shipwreck did not believe him, and so Pi tells them another story in which the animals aboard the lifeboat are allegorical representations of the human survivors. Once we begin to think of this story as imagined, this suddenly casts the artistic exaggeration of 3D spectacle into more appropriate terms. And I will say that at times the effects were so realistic that I physically jumped or squirmed in response to pouncing predators and stalking sharks.

Before watching Dances with Wolves, I read three reviews from Roger Ebert, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) and Vincent Canby (The New York Times). The links are below.

Here are three of my expectations for this film (made in 1990) based on reading these reviews:

1. The cinematography will be stunning. 

“is like a vacation in the Rockies” (Canby)

“magical” (Travers)

2. Like many epics, this is a kind of historical fantasy whose narrative will swing between genuine, trustworthy authenticity and highly questionable distortions of real encounters between whites and Native Americans. As a “sentimental fantasy” (Ebert), it must be taken with a grain of salt. 

“The movie makes amends, of a sort, for hundreds of racist and small-minded Westerns that went before it.” (Ebert)

“[it] teeters on the edge of Boy’s Life literature, that is, on the brink of earnest silliness.” (Canby)

“[Costner’s] expansive style shows a genuine feel for the muscular poetry of the landscape and the Sioux’s language” (Travers)

3. I will probably get frustrated or bored with the extreme attention to detail and length (4 hours)

While Travers praises its “economy, grace and authenticity,” and Ebert seems to love the details, Canby finds them a little dry: “Though the details are specific …they are presented in the perfunctory way of generalized statements in guidebooks…Its triumph is that it is never exactly boring, only dulled. It’s a movie in acute need of sharpening.”

After watching this film I have to agree with Peter Travers’ characterization of this film as “en epic that breathes.” I didn’t really understand what this phrase meant until having finished this movie. I find it interesting that Travers was able to both say it needed “sharpening” and that it “breathes.” I tend to be more moved by shorter, more tightly-packed works of art, but I never felt the boredom I anticipated feeling. This may be the first epic film to convince me that length alone allows for character development in a way that a half hour or even two hour film cannot. Yes, I did end up needing that handful of salt: more than once I found it hard to move past the incredibly problematic casting of the Sioux as “noble savage.” I always find it problematic when war is glorified in films, and I was struck by the fact that this story managed to uphold so many romantic ideals of masculinity and stereotypes about Native Americans while also at times complicating these notions of battlefield glory and problematizing ideas of racial prejudice. I think Canby’s snarky review was a little unwarranted. There is a lot to be critical of, but if you boil it down to the story told, I was completely drawn in (yes, I cried when the wolf was shot and when Wind In His Hair, skeptical of Dunbar from the beginning, shouted his friendship to him as he set off at the end of the movie).

Its hard to talk about the idea of a historical “fantasy” epic that tells the narrative that was not the predominate one acted out by white settlers. Are we allowed to suspend disbelief if we are re-writing over a troubling history? The cinematography certainly was stunning, and this can help in suspending disbelief. That said, there were moments which make the audience confront history, such as when the Sioux come across a tribe of buffalo wiped out by whites and left to rot (this waste is a powerful motif throughout the movie). I came to appreciate how Costner really took time with each shot, letting it breathe, so to speak. A word that often comes up in describing epic is grandiose, suggesting over-the-top. But Costner certainly was economical, as Travers pointed out–sometimes this meant a split-second shot of a sunset was pared down to allow for a five-minute sweep over a buffalo massacre, as a young calf ran in confused circles. This film showed me how an epic can be sweeping and have a kind of rhythm (or breath) of its own, but not necessarily be extravagant.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dances-with-wolves-1990

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/dances-with-wolves-19901121

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0CE6DB1338F93AA35752C1A966958260

I hadn’t seen Anne Hathaway in many of her other films, but felt like my impression of her as an actress and as a person was really influenced by the opinions of other people (from friends to critics). Most of my association with her acting was in comedic roles, such as her breakout role in The Princess Diaries or her role as Agent 99 in Get Smart. Having seen her in interviews, I thought of her as a very poised, kind of plain woman who didn’t show much dramatic emotion—that is,  I found her kind of neutral, and my feelings about her were ambivalent.

I first saw this film in theatre and so the unique cinematography was even more striking than on a smaller screen. To see extreme close-up shots of the familiar faces of star actors when you are used to seeing unfamiliar faces at a distance on a theatre stage was striking, and even watching the movie for the third time or so I find it difficult to not be fully drawn in by these extreme close-ups.

I found Fantine perfectly pitiful, especially in contrast to the brash prostitutes in the “Lovely Ladies” sequence, and I think this is due to director Tom Hooper’s attempt to capture a series of caricatured vignettes in his cinematography. While Hathaway’s persona as a celebrity was distracting in a role like Catwoman (The Dark Knight Rises), I felt I could follow her completely as a character in this film.

Hooper takes this film to a whole new aesthetic of epic. While many epics by nature can verge on chintzy, this film was beautiful in a shaky, provocative, and distorted way. Fantine’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” comes within the first half hour of the film, and by that point I think most viewers are convinced of Hathaway’s accuracy in portraying the plight of Fantine. I am tempted to say any actor could have played this role for two reasons: it’s virtually impossible to not feel sympathy for Fantine, and, 2) audiences have never experienced Les Mis in this close-up, super-realist way before. The fact that they performed the music live on set also I think results in a much more realistic acting for all the characters. The dramatic effect of watching a star actor have all of her hair brutally chopped off during filming also had a strong effect on me, making it easier to see the character she was playing by making Hathaway’s recognizable face less physically familiar. All that said, I most definitely attribute the fact that I was able to suspend disbelief not simply to the power of the story, music, and cinematography, but also to Anne Hathaway’s convincingly poignant portrayal of an epic heroine, a grisette bearing the burden of representing the working class’s struggle against injustice.