Ang Lee makes the pressure to keep other people happy painfully easy to understand. We rate his patient attention to concealed feelings highly, though his broader comedy can try our patience.
Fi1m perspective
In The Wedding Banquet (1993), an awkward look can do more than a prolonged joke. A gay Taiwanese property agent in New York arranges a marriage of convenience, and Lee watches the effort of keeping everyone satisfied. He lets us understand the deception before he starts finding comedy in it. We were moved by those uneasy exchanges because the younger people's fear of disappointing their parents carries such affection. This is Lee at his most persuasive: funny, attentive and unwilling to make anyone merely ridiculous.
That concern with family expectations runs through the early films, from Pushing Hands (1991) to Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), with The Wedding Banquet between them. The screenplay for the latter, written with James Schamus and Neil Peng, makes the marriage serve two practical purposes: pleasing the parents and securing the tenant a green card. Neither obligation is treated as a trivial excuse for farce. Lee can then make trouble without pretending that anyone involved is particularly foolish.
The move to English-language filmmaking with Sense and Sensibility (1995) puts his attention to unspoken feelings to work in period drama. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) takes him into larger-scale genre filmmaking without losing the emotional focus. In Brokeback Mountain (2005), directing actors to convey inner conflict through restraint remains a particular strength. These changes of setting make sense for a director interested in the limits that families and cultures place on what people can admit.
His later interest in technology becomes prominent in the visual effects-driven Life of Pi (2012), followed by the experiments of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) and Gemini Man (2019). There is curiosity here that we would not wish him to lose. But Gemini Man is also a warning that technical ambition can leave the drama struggling to hold our attention.
Our reservation about The Wedding Banquet is smaller and more revealing. Lee keeps some of the broader farce going after the characters' awkwardness has already made the point, and cultural misunderstanding sometimes makes them too predictable. The quieter exchanges are sufficiently funny and affecting that the extra insistence feels unnecessary. Start there, with the caveat that the wedding reception goes on longer than it needs to.
Biography
Ang Lee is a Taiwanese film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 23 October 1954 in Pingtung County, Taiwan. He studied at the National Taiwan University of Arts, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and New York University.
Lee gained recognition in Taiwan with the 'Father Knows Best' trilogy of films exploring family and cultural themes: Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). His first English-language feature was Sense and Sensibility (1995). Subsequent films include The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lust, Caution (2007) and Life of Pi (2012). He has received Academy Awards for best director for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi.
