The Cinema of Ang Lee by Whitney Crothers Dilley

Author:Whitney Crothers Dilley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production, Performing Arts/Individual Director (see also Biography & Autobiography/Entertainment & Performing Arts), PER018000, PER004010
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Cast

Ride with the Devil has a far more sprawling setting than Ang Lee’s earlier dramas Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, but this movie’s characters are no less finely drawn and the director imbues each with color and depth. In this film, Lee again returns to using his stalwart male lead, Tobey Maguire. Already Maguire had proved himself, while still a young teenager, in Lee’s earlier film, The Ice Storm, where he played the lead and central core of the film. Here, Maguire takes on an even greater challenge, operating within a distant and remote context of nineteenth-century history. His performance is again superb. The cast also includes a startlingly good Skeet Ulrich as Jack Bull Chiles. In another surprising turn, Ang Lee cast a recently acclaimed pop singer, Jewel Kilcher, as the young female lead, the widow Sue Lee. While it is uncertain what factors led to her being cast, her presence in the movie was no doubt thought to raise its appeal especially for young people following the trends of pop music. (Casting pop stars in films is certainly more common practice in Asia; examples are Hong Kong’s Anita Mui and The Wedding Banquet’s May Chin, megastars with pop music careers as well as film leads.) Kilcher’s performance has been widely praised by critics, who considered her amazingly intuitive as an actress; her open face and childlike beauty perfectly suited the role.

Jeffrey Wright takes another main role as Daniel Holt, a black man caught up in the fighting for the South—this controversial position becomes a central contradiction in the film. Wright turns in the best performance as a freed slave who takes up the cause of the South in loyalty to fight alongside the man who freed him. As time goes on and the war becomes more bloody and brutal, this quiet, sensitive man begins to realize that even loyalty has its limits in the face of overwhelming wrongdoing. For Lee, Jeffrey Wright’s role was a pivotal one for the film; it provided him with the opportunity to explore the familiar topic of the outsider caught in circumstances through no fault of his own that alienate and distance him from society. Wright gives a nuanced and delicate performance (in his early appearances in the film, his hat is drawn down deeply over his forehead and his eyes are lowered in a world-weary deference to social mores). Only as time goes on does Wright slowly add a guarded warmth and humanity to his character, demonstrating the ingrained and implacable social barriers faced by a man in his circumstances.

Ang Lee’s knack for selecting up-and-coming actors is clearly apparent in this film; for example, Mark Ruffalo appears in a bit part as the traitorious Alf Bowden. The cast further includes a viciously brooding Jim Caviezel, in one of the best and most intense supporting roles, as Black John. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is also supremely petulant and abhorrent as Mackeson. The director’s selection of Ruffalo, Caviezel, and Rhys Meyers predates

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