Birth of the Dragon (2017) — George Nolfi
A film about two of Asia’s biggest icons turned into a bad marketing experiment.
First of all, films like “Birth of the Dragon” are not landmarks, but rather are signs of things to come. It’s a bad film, no doubt, but not because of the quality of the shootings or the acting. It’s its whole that makes this a sour attempt to take on a legend. Having said that, the director, actors and even the plot — with some observations nevertheless — and material targeted by the film can be said to have a more promising success in the future.
Director George Nolfi, according to his IMDb mini-biopic, is kind of a genius straight out of Boston. His academic accomplishments are impeccable and go all the way to a PhD in UCLA. His film career, on the other hand, is scarce. He had some scripts turned into action films and had his directorial debut in 2011 with “The Adjustment Bureau”, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. “Birth of the Dragon” is his second feature and the first within the Blumhouse Tilt fresh new label, created with the sole purpose of searching for a new niche to invest on in the cinema industry. And here lies the productive results of trying out new things. The risk of hiring a relatively new director for a film not intended to make big money is small and therefore an opportunity for Nolfi to prove himself, which he did. The fighting scenes were entertaining, funny and honest — although I myself have not enough knowledge of martial arts to have a say on it at all. He seems to have good control of his camera and its workings, but I’m afraid he got a little bit lost in the narrative.
The beginning of the film is encouraging. Bruce Lee (a great performance by Philip Ng) is as exciting as the legacy he left behind. We are taken inside his gym, where he trains every one who is willing to learn by his methods, independently of ethnic backgrounds, or anything else as a matter of fact. He’s not yet a big Hollywood shot but already presents the personality of a star. At the opposite polo of the narrative was Wong Jack Man (Xiao Yu — a winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival of 1994 at 18 years old, the youngest to have ever done it at that time) a myth from the Shiaolin monastery — the birthplace of kung fu and consequently the bearer of its traditions — fighting a man from the tai chi style. The film puts Jack Man as the past and Lee as the future of kung fu, meaning the future and the development of the fighting style is necessarily expansionist outwardly of Chinese borders. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the plot gets dragged to a white student of Lee’s, Steve McKee (Billy Magnussen), who “unexpectedly” falls in love with a beautiful immigrant being held as slave labor by a Chinese gang. To save her he has to promote a battle between the two legends, who of course accept it for the well being of their pupil. In other words, what was supposed to be a new take on Bruce Lee’s, and even Wong Jack Man’s, legacy turned out to be just one more descendant of “Madame Butterfly” or “Miss Saigon”: an Asian woman having to be saved by a white man who needs his loyal Asian helpers to defeat evil.
Precisely because of this wildly weird twist of focus in the film, that was supposed to be about “Birth of the Dragon” — meaning, the development of Lee’s own fighting style and philosophy —, many condemned the production for being one more example of whitewashing. After all, the film made use of Chinese icons for publicity and marketing purposes while neglecting them to secondary roles to a white main character. An interesting Forbes magazine article claimed this other form of whitewashing to be a practical requirement for a film to be internationally sold as a “white” film and not as an exotic foreign film, which makes sense, but at the same time is a result of things not well thought through. And it’s logical when one first thinks about how to sell a movie to all audiences, in every corner of the planet. Bruce Lee and kung fu’s appeal would attract Asians and Asian-aficionados. McKee’s character would be appealing to general audiences accustomed to seeing caucasian heroes — even if this was a much goofier and Spider Man-ish character. Independently of the goals behind Blumhouse Tilt, WWE Studios (a studio dedicated exclusively to films about fighting, wrestling and action pictures) and Kylin Pictures (a company dedicated to bring Chinese films to international audiences, for example what it did with ‘Flowers of War’, by director Zhang Yimou), the films was a box-office failure and a failure economically. Still, it is one more movie with Asian characters in a market that is dry on them.
I wish I could discuss more Bruce Lee’s importance to films in general and to Asian representativity in the cultural world. But I will leave it for the discussion of one of Lee’s very own works, not a bad attempt to make use of it.
