李安電影：螢幕之後The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen(書摘)

Whitney Crothers Dilley

    Ang Lee has been referred to as an auteur and it is not difficult to see why—he is an artist with his actors, and seems to draw amazing work out of his cast, from the smallest to the greatest.

    Keeping in mind that he has made films in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, British English from the time of Jane Austen, high-school drop-out cowboy English, American English from the Civil War era, and 1970s slang, this is no small feat. He has drawn performances of the highest quality out of actors as diverse as Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat, as well as defining and prodigious early work from a young Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Katie Holmes and, at nineteen, Kate Winslet and Zhang Ziyi.

    As Jake Gyllenhaal reflected after the making of Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lee is also "fluent in the language of silence." This has been proven by his films from his earliest 15-minute dialogue-free scene between Deb Snyder and Sihung Lung (Lang Xiong) in Pushing Hands (Tuishou, 1991), to the paean to non-communication and 1970s angst, The Ice Storm (1997), and, finally, to the tortured secrets of repressed souls in Brokeback Mountain.

    Indeed, the use of silence is so effective for this director; the last 15 minutes of The Ice Storm were virtually a silent movie. Ang Lee tells his stories through language, but he also narrates them through physical posture and facial expression. Thus, he brought out such memorable performances as Heath Ledger's clenched-jaw repression, Sigourney Weaver's languid and vampish physicality, Joan Allen's erasing of her own identity, Michelle Yeoh's fathomless loyalty, Hugh Grant's internalised awkwardness, and Tobey Maguire's passage from boyhood to maturity. The nuanced performances in Brokeback Mountain were widely recognised as three of the young actors in the film, all just in their twenties, were each nominated for Academy Awards, one of the youngest casts in history to receive such recognition....(更多內容請參見The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen一書)

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