Butler's Cinema Scene

Liu Yifei

“MULAN” My rating: B

115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Disney’s new live-action “Mulan” occupies a precarious sweet spot that is hard to establish and perhaps harder to keep.

The film is simple enough (and inoffensive enough) for children, yet possesses ample thematic depth and technical imagination to engage adults.

Well, most adults, anyway. Certainly those adults who will end up watching it with their offspring.

The story is already familiar to many of us, thanks to several centuries of Chinese folklore and numerous film adaptations, especially the 1998 animated Disney version.  The premise finds a young woman, Mulan, disguising herself as a man and taking her aged/injured father’s place in the Emperor’s army in a fight to repel ruthless invaders.

It hardly needs pointing out that the yarn’s feminist credentials remain timely. Moreover, director Niki Caro has made a career of female empowerment with titles like the sublime “Whale Rider” and the gut-punching “North Country.” She knows her way around the subject.

But she also brings to this incarnation martial arts action reminiscent of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and a David Lean-worthy sense of place and space (although with Lean you knew  those spectacular sunsets and sand dunes were the real deal; here they may have sprung from a computer program).

And in young Chinese star Liu Yifei the film has a heroine able to suggest her character’s inner drive and thoughts while presenting a manly — i.e., emotion-smothering — face to the outside world. (Has there ever been a lead female role with so little smiling?)

This “Mulan” forgoes the musical numbers of the animated version, not to mention the goofy dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Instead it emphasizes visual beauty and battle (albeit PG-13 battle…these soldiers die bloodlessly).

The villain here is Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee), the scarred, long-haired barbarian leader seeking revenge for the death of his father years before. With an army of gravity-defying ninjas, Bori Khan is relentlessly marching into China, intent on personally slaying the aging Emperor (Jet Li).

Li Gong

Mulan — her female form hidden by bindings and armor and her hair tied up out of sight — goes through basic training with a squad of young men who have no idea she’s a girl.  For one thing, she perennially volunteers for guard duty so as to avoid group bathing.

Two of her fellow soldiers are particularly important to Mulan’s story.  The first is her commanding officer, Tung (Donnie Yen), who marvels at her military prowess while maintaining a strict code that, should he discover the truth about her sex, would demand that she be killed or exiled. The the other is a fellow recruit, Hong Hui (Yoson An), who provides a  love interest of sorts.

But perhaps the movie’s most important character, next to Mulan, is Xianniang (Li Gong), a shape-shifting witch in the employ of Bori Khan. Clad in black with the top half of her face painted white, Xianniang is a sort of Asian riff on Snow White’s evil queen. She’s cruel, deadly and, well, sexy.

Xianniang plays a pivotal role in the screenplay (by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Elizabeth Martin and Lauren Hynek), for like Mulan she is a powerful woman whose worth goes unrecognized by the men who exploit her skills but deny her equality.  Small wonder that eventually this sorceress finds more to admire in her adversary than in her dismissive confederates.

It hardly goes without saying that little girls are going to go ga-ga for “Mulan,” but there’s enough here to keep even jaded viewers engrossed. Thanks to the current unpleasantness, we’ll miss seeing the film on an expansive theater screen, but even in our living rooms this tale keeps our attention.

| Robert W. Butler