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This review contains spoilers.
There’s a difference between a movie being racist and a character being racist, and I think a scene here between Mickey Rourke and Ariane that illustrates the distinction. Rourke tells Ariane he’s been reading up on the history of Chinese people in America, and shows an awareness of the discriminatory laws they were subject to. He refers to a picture celebrating the completion of a railroad, noting the demographic groups who were present, and points out that the Chinese labourers who did the actual backbreaking work of building them were not in the photo. One might think he’s developed an understanding of their marginalization, but his next line reveals the opposite, as he speculates that it was due to their secretive nature. Rourke’s character, a highly decorated police captain who takes over the precinct in New York’s Chinatown, spews an endless stream of bigotry as he wages his war on the local triads, yet scenes like that illustrate his limited understanding. His Vietnam service is a critical detail, showing that he conflates the Chinese with the Vietnamese as he tries to essentially re-fight the war on his own terms, disgusted by the defeatist, corrupt cops that populate his precinct and try to constrain him.
And while Rourke is our protagonist and much of the film is filtered through his perspective, the movie devotes a sizable amount of screentime to upstart gangster John Lone, who plays the movie in silky smooth drip king mode. And while Lone’s charisma is undeniable, it isn’t eager to either glibly worship him or play up his villainy, but instead drops us into his world, showing his role in the community (offering his help to people whose options are limited in mainstream society), with his peers (maneuvering to oust an elder, more risk-averse triad leader) and running his criminal enterprise (a trip to Thailand to give us supply contacts a bloody surprise). These are not positive images of Chinese Americans, but like William Friedkin’s Cruising, which attracted similar controversy for making a cynical thriller about the gay leather bar scene when LGBTQ representation in Hollywood movies was extremely limited, there’s too much detail and genuine fascination in the portrayal for it to be dismissed as bigotry. Was any other Hollywood movie of this time and with this level of budget even acknowledging that there are multiple Chinese languages (going so far as to reference the Hakka dialect)? I am not of the group being depicted and as a result may not share the same sensitivities, but I can’t agree with the claims that this movie is racist. (It’s worth noting that Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, who have important parts in this, also starred in the following year’s Big Trouble in Little China, another movie about a clueless white guy in Chinatown, although that movie is more overtly satirical in this respect. I also should note that as a Torontonian, I chuckled whenever the villains mentioned the rival triad from Toronto.)
This is also a moody, forcefully directed crime thriller, powered by a electric performance by Rourke, who hurtles through the movie like a natural disaster, leaving everything and everyone he comes across in ruins. (If there’s one issue with Rourke’s role, it’s the weird dye they put on his hair to make him look like a grizzled veteran. Rourke was at the peak of his sex appeal at this point, so the bad dye job clashes extra hard with his good looks.) I just got finished defending the movie for distinguishing its perspective from its hero’s, yet there’s no denying that Rourke’s immense magnetism pulls us into his orbit, and in its most thrilling sequences locks onto his feverish intensity. Look at the scene where a pair of assassins kills his wife, and he takes frantically takes them out, the second one being dispatched with a gruesome headshot and subsequent explosion. Or the scene where he accosts Lone in a garishly lit nightclub, barging into multiple bathroom stalls where people are doing cocaine (an unexpectedly comedic touch), and then chases after two gunwomen with new wave hairdos, recklessly exchanging gunfire through traffic. Or the showdown with its mixture of car chase and gunplay on train tracks. The movie may be messy (there’s a subplot about an undercover agent that seems forgotten about for much of the runtime, although it too gets a bloody, forceful denouement), but as a fan of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, I don’t think neatness is always and asset, and scenes like these are bracingly visceral in their impact.
I do think the movie suffers in its portrayal of its female characters, with Rourke’s wife and Ariane coming off less like fully formed people than as plot devices and extensions of Rourke’s psyche. The idea of the long suffering wife seems more important than who the wife really is. And the idea of Ariane, with her cultural identity and her fancy apartment with a view to die for (which Rourke transforms into a police clubhouse of sorts in one of the movie’s funnier scenes) seems more important than how she really thinks and feels. I understand Ariane’s performance was frequently cited as one of the movie’s weaknesses, but I think the writing lets her down more than actual deficiencies in her acting, and the last line of the movie concludes their relationship on a completely wrong note. (I understand that Cimino was forced to put this in at the studio’s request after they didn’t like the original closing line: “Well, I guess if you fight a war long enough, you end up marrying the enemy.” In my opinion, the original line would have been clumsy but still greatly preferable to what we get in the finished film.) But I suppose the fact that these characters don’t feel like three dimensional characters is true to how Rourke sees them, being so caught up in his crusade that it’s withered away his empathy.
In short, this is undeniably messy, but also very good.
Year of the Dragon (Cimino, 1985)
This review contains spoilers.
And while Rourke is our protagonist and much of the film is filtered through his perspective, the movie devotes a sizable amount of screentime to upstart gangster John Lone, who plays the movie in silky smooth drip king mode. And while Lone’s charisma is undeniable, it isn’t eager to either glibly worship him or play up his villainy, but instead drops us into his world, showing his role in the community (offering his help to people whose options are limited in mainstream society), with his peers (maneuvering to oust an elder, more risk-averse triad leader) and running his criminal enterprise (a trip to Thailand to give us supply contacts a bloody surprise). These are not positive images of Chinese Americans, but like William Friedkin’s Cruising, which attracted similar controversy for making a cynical thriller about the gay leather bar scene when LGBTQ representation in Hollywood movies was extremely limited, there’s too much detail and genuine fascination in the portrayal for it to be dismissed as bigotry. Was any other Hollywood movie of this time and with this level of budget even acknowledging that there are multiple Chinese languages (going so far as to reference the Hakka dialect)? I am not of the group being depicted and as a result may not share the same sensitivities, but I can’t agree with the claims that this movie is racist. (It’s worth noting that Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, who have important parts in this, also starred in the following year’s Big Trouble in Little China, another movie about a clueless white guy in Chinatown, although that movie is more overtly satirical in this respect. I also should note that as a Torontonian, I chuckled whenever the villains mentioned the rival triad from Toronto.)
This is also a moody, forcefully directed crime thriller, powered by a electric performance by Rourke, who hurtles through the movie like a natural disaster, leaving everything and everyone he comes across in ruins. (If there’s one issue with Rourke’s role, it’s the weird dye they put on his hair to make him look like a grizzled veteran. Rourke was at the peak of his sex appeal at this point, so the bad dye job clashes extra hard with his good looks.) I just got finished defending the movie for distinguishing its perspective from its hero’s, yet there’s no denying that Rourke’s immense magnetism pulls us into his orbit, and in its most thrilling sequences locks onto his feverish intensity. Look at the scene where a pair of assassins kills his wife, and he takes frantically takes them out, the second one being dispatched with a gruesome headshot and subsequent explosion. Or the scene where he accosts Lone in a garishly lit nightclub, barging into multiple bathroom stalls where people are doing cocaine (an unexpectedly comedic touch), and then chases after two gunwomen with new wave hairdos, recklessly exchanging gunfire through traffic. Or the showdown with its mixture of car chase and gunplay on train tracks. The movie may be messy (there’s a subplot about an undercover agent that seems forgotten about for much of the runtime, although it too gets a bloody, forceful denouement), but as a fan of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, I don’t think neatness is always and asset, and scenes like these are bracingly visceral in their impact.
I do think the movie suffers in its portrayal of its female characters, with Rourke’s wife and Ariane coming off less like fully formed people than as plot devices and extensions of Rourke’s psyche. The idea of the long suffering wife seems more important than who the wife really is. And the idea of Ariane, with her cultural identity and her fancy apartment with a view to die for (which Rourke transforms into a police clubhouse of sorts in one of the movie’s funnier scenes) seems more important than how she really thinks and feels. I understand Ariane’s performance was frequently cited as one of the movie’s weaknesses, but I think the writing lets her down more than actual deficiencies in her acting, and the last line of the movie concludes their relationship on a completely wrong note. (I understand that Cimino was forced to put this in at the studio’s request after they didn’t like the original closing line: “Well, I guess if you fight a war long enough, you end up marrying the enemy.” In my opinion, the original line would have been clumsy but still greatly preferable to what we get in the finished film.) But I suppose the fact that these characters don’t feel like three dimensional characters is true to how Rourke sees them, being so caught up in his crusade that it’s withered away his empathy.
In short, this is undeniably messy, but also very good.