I was a bit anxious going into The Grandmaster, the first film in five years by legendary Chinese director Wong Kar Wai. The source of my anxiety was neither its director, whose films I love, nor its subject matter. In fact, the latter increased my excitement exponentially. See, the subject of The Grandmaster is Ip Man, the legendary martial arts teacher and mentor to Bruce Lee who's been brought to the silver screen in several straightforward kick-'em-up (see, shoot 'em up, but with martial arts... oh, fine, it's dumb) movies. But now Wong Kar Wai, King of the Art House, is going to fix Ip Man in his contemplative, visually arresting crosshairs? Wong Kar Wai is doing a martial arts movie?! This I had to see.
The reason for my worry is that the film is being released in the US by the Weinstein Company. There's a good reason Harvey Weinstein's called "Harvey Scissorhands"—the American version of The Grandmaster is missing several scenes from the Chinese cut, and other scenes have been altered. The result, I kept seeing on my news feed, was a film that is not only a "butchered masterpiece," but "boring" to boot.
Wong Kar Wai films always walk a delicate line: They're movies where nothing much happens, at least not the sorts of things you see in traditional Hollywood movies. Take In the Mood for Love, for exmaple. It follows a man and a woman whose respective spouses are cheating on them with each other. The protagonists grow closer and closer over the course of the movie, but there are no declarations of love. No dramatic pursuits through the rain. Hell, they don't even kiss. It's a quiet, evenly paced movie where the characters never really explain what they're going through emotionally, to each other or to the audience. And yet the movie never loses your attention; you ache for the characters and what they're going through.
Part of that is how Wong Kar Wai structures his movies, flitting back and forth between different places, times, and characters in a way that's complicated but feels absolutely natural. Also responsible are his stunning visual style and brilliant actors, key among them frequent collaborator Tony Leung, who stars in In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster. The result is something that's emotionally and visually captivating, like you're being carried along on a current of wonderful filmmaking, surrounded by beauty on all sides for you to look at as you float along.
It's all very carefully put together. So, needless to say, if you mess with a Wong Kar-Wai film you run the very real risk of turning a masterpiece into a boring, pointless mess.
Luckily, The Grandmaster did not suffer that fate.
I think I can see where the "boring" comes from. If you buy your ticket expecting a martial arts movie, you're likely going to be disappointed by all the thematically-based scenes that take place in between Ip Man and Gong Er's (Ziyi Zhang) intermittent bouts of ass-kicking. Don't get me wrong: The ass-kicking, when it happens, is fabulous. The man responsible for it is legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping, who's also behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Kill Bill and Matrix movies, Kung Fu Hustle, and many more. There's just no way the fight scenes aren't going to be amazing, and they are. But it's not like other martial arts movies, where every conflict the main character has inevitably leads to a fight scene where he achieves personal victory by hitting things. For all its martial arts pedigree, The Grandmaster is still very much a Wong Kar-Wai movie. You go in expecting that, and you'll be golden.
Granted, the influence of the Weinstein company is visible. You can tell that the character of Gong Er is hugely important to both Ip Man and the larger themes of the movie, and yet the US cut relegates her to the role of second fiddle, allowing her to pop up at certain times during Ip Man's life. According to according to Film.com's David Ehrlich, who wrote an an excellent piece on the differences between the US and Chinese versions, much of Gong Er's characterization was excised from the US cut for the sake of making it more like Ip Man: A Life. The character played by Chen Chang shows up for all of one scene, which struck me as weird when he's pretty high up in the credits. He has a larger presence in the Chinese version as well. The way each character is given an on-screen title noting who they are is another thing that's very conspicuously not Wong Kar-Wai's style.
For all that, the version of The Grandmaster you can see in theaters stateside is still stunning. It doesn't hurt that Wong Kar Wai was heavily involved in cutting it. The result is something I never wanted to end. So I guess it's good that there's a longer, reportedly better version for me to track down, huh?
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