When Ang Lee stormed the American stage with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was easy to think you had him pegged, that you understood what he was all about and so didn’t need to pay that much attention to him anymore. What we found, instead, was that this was a director who is constantly surprising, both in his choices of projects to direct and in the style and perspective with which he chooses to direct them. After the bold decision to try his hand at the superhero movie with The Hulk, which was polarizing, he took what could have been some sort of “statement” film in Brokeback Mountain, and instead made a quiet, introspective, understated movie about an unrealizable romance. He handles delicacy as well as vivid fantasy and adventure, which is rare in a director.
His work on Life of Pi is equally remarkable. From the opening shots he establishes a tone to this movie that captures the wonder and innocence of a zoo alongside the potential for absolute terror of wild animals. Collaborating with one of the best cinematographers in the business right now, Claudio Miranda, he photographs this absolutely beautiful world at sea with the help of some incredibly immersive 3D (more on that later) to put us in Pi’s environment as well as his state of mind. It would be nice to see a film this poetic and stylistic to take the Oscar, and for its director to establish himself in the minds of the public as someone to seek out.
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