RSS
Home
80s movie appreciation: Year of the Dragon
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Year of the Dragon was a commercial and critical failure when it appeared in 1985, and time has been no kinder to it. It is dismissed, if considered at all, as racist and melodramatic, with an intense but miscast Mickey Rourke at the center of a sprawling story that takes on much more than it is capable of handling. It was directed by Michael Cimino, who went from Hollywood golden boy (The Deer Hunter) to eternal joke (Heaven’s Gate) in the space of one film and has never really recovered.
Politically correct it is not. And the picture does have a rambling quality to it that veers into melodrama. However, because its flaws are so easy to spot, the film’s many virtues frequently get overlooked.
Any discussion of the film has to begin with the two great forces stirring up the action – director Cimino and Rourke. Cimino’s energy and dynamism in presenting this story is matched by the intense Rourke, who despite being cast as a much older man nevertheless makes you believe his fevered mind, his addiction to chaos, his inability to break free of the Vietnam War in analyzing the crime syndicates he fights against. Even its detractors have to grant that Year of the Dragon is never boring. In addition, John Lone makes a terrific villain almost in the tradition of James Bond, an urbane upstart whose suave politesse contrasts nicely with Rourke’s rumpled antiheroism.
The production design dazzles; most people didn’t realize it at the time, but the Chinatown in the movie was built by the production company in North Carolina. Cimino tells the story (and it is on the DVD’s commentary) that he showed an early print of the film to his friend Stanley Kubrick, who remarked that “Chinatown looks amazing.” Cimino had to explain to him that it was a set! Kubrick, who grew up in Brooklyn and possessed the most amazing eye in cinema history, had been fooled. And no wonder; the level of detail and splendor startles in the beautiful widescreen photography by Alex Thomson. There are also some terrific shots for those interested in such things; one in particular, a tracking shot that follows Rourke as he browbeats a police regiment, has a remarkable 180-degree turn that changes both the viewing angle and perhaps our angle on his behavior (see below).
Scripted by Oliver Stone, Year of the Dragon also has one of the more interesting analyses of how crime works in the United States, at a level that was not repeated until the television show The Wire twenty years later. The reason Stanley White (Rourke) causes such a ruckus throughout the picture is because he wants to shake up the entire system of petty graft and controlled criminality respected by both the criminal and police establishments. At the end of the day, the cops in Year of the Dragon want to be left alone and look good enough on paper to increase their pay grades; as long as there isn’t blood on the streets, they’re willing to look the other way. White has many flaws, and gets many people killed throughout the movie, but his excesses grow out of a desire to actually fight crime rather than comfortably coexist with it. And indeed it may be this issue, rather than any insensitivity on the part of White or the filmmakers, that drew such ire at the time. The film makes the point that problems cannot be solved by the standard bureaucracies running the police force, but that they are systemic and mutually parasitic. And, at the end of the film, Stanley White wins his personal battle but accomplishes nothing, and is reduced to disrupting Lone’s funeral, whose replacement is already gathering his territory behind the scenes. It’s a dark conclusion, and one which makes Year of the Dragon worth a second look.
Related Articles:
Comments
