‘Mulan’ scores in a live-action version

     When asked in a Vanity Fair interview why she and not a Chinese director had been chosen to direct Mulan, Niki Caro pointed out that two cultures had to be considered.

     The first, of course, is Chinese culture, which spawned the enduring legend of Mulan. The second, according to Caro, is Disney culture. Any director of a live-action remake of the 1998 Disney animated musical would have to negotiate his or her way through both cultures. 

    I found the comment both interesting and instructive.
    When you see Mulan, you’ll be watching a Disney movie, which means that the Chinese settings are seldom less than picturesque and the movie’s desire to deliver an inspirational message about family loyalty, courage, and girl power couldn’t be more clearly stated.

    If none of that bothers you (and I doubt that it will annoy most of the Mulan audience), you’ll find a strong helping of live action from Caro and an all-Asian cast led by Yifei Liu,  who plays Mulan. 
     Yifei's Mulan is endowed with extraordinary amounts of Chi, which in this movie might be seen as the equivalent of the Force in the Star Wars universe. Mulan can maximize her use of Chi to defeat enemies in battle -- one-on-one or en masse.

    Sans the songs of the original, Caro tells a story about a  culture-bound young woman who is instructed to hide her Chi and stick to the traditional feminine role that has been proscribed for her; i.e., Mulan's supposed to marry.
      Mulan has other ideas. She rebels by disguising herself as a man, borrowing her warrior father’s sword, and joining the army that’s trying to protect the emperor from northern invaders led by the ruthless Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee).

    To help him in his quest, Bori Khan has enlisted the help of a witch (Gong Li) who has great powers and who, we’ll learn, has more in common with Mulan than we initially expect.

     Martial arts star Jet Li portrays the emperor. Tzi Ma appears as Mulan’s father. Both are warriors, although Tzi's character, disabled by a war wound, long has retired.

    In keeping with the spirit of the original, Caro (Whale Rider) takes a mostly comic approach to Mulan’s integration into the army, where she finds a friendly rival in Chen Hong (Yoson An). 

    The other soldiers serve as a comic chorus, often commenting on Mulan’s overly ripe body odor. She refuses to shower lest her womanhood is discovered. Should Mulan reveal herself to be a woman, the Commander (Donnie Yen) will expel her for dishonesty. 

      The delicacy of Liu’s features could make it difficult for us to accept her male-warrior pose: The movie says otherwise. The rules governing men and women are so ingrained, no one possibly could be expected to see them violated.

    Aside from the lack of musical numbers, Caro and her team have made other alterations. Some may miss Mushu, the motor-mouthed dragon who was voiced by Eddie Murphy.

    It’s probably the right choice. Caro downplays the story’s more cartoonish aspects, although she does employ special effects for a phoenix, a beautiful bird, and Gong Li’s character goes through many shape-shifting transformations. 

   Caro handles large-scale battle sequences well enough. Some of the combat sequences hinted at the work of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Shadow) although none display Zhang’s flair for devising at least one bit so outrageously original, it becomes a talking point. 

   Then again, Mulan's charge doesn't derive solely from combat; it stems from Mulan’s emergence as a fully realized woman warrior and from the way that she upholds the movie’s trio of virtues: Loyal, brave and true.

    Fans of Chinese spectacle rightly can argue that Caro hasn’t gone far enough in bringing either operatic grandeur or human frailty to the forefront.  Fair to say that Mulan stakes out a middle ground between PG-13 entertainment and the best of Chinese epic moviemaking.

     But back to where we began: This is a Disney movie that’s trying for the broadest possible appeal. 

    Mulan will be shown on Disney+, not in theaters. Still, it qualifies as a movie of impressive scale and clear visual command, an effort that, for my money, far surpasses its animated predecessor. *

*For the record: “My money” probably doesn't even qualify as chump change in the world of Disney resources.

Poles who helped save Jews

Jessica Chastain starts in The Zookeeper's Wife, the latest big-screen drama to deal with the Holocaust.

Israel has awarded the title "Righteous Among the Nations" to more than 26,000 Gentiles, brave souls who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. To date, more Poles -- 6,620 in all -- have received this honor than individuals from any other nation, a statistic partly explained by the fact that Poland became the epicenter of Nazi efforts to annihilate Europe's Jews. Beyond that, Poland had the largest pre-war Jewish population of any country in Europe, numbering 3.5 million.

Among those honored by Israel are the characters in The Zookeeper's Wife, a movie based on a true story that was recounted in a best-selling book by author Diane Ackerman. There's an inherent pitfall in such heroic Holocaust stories, the most notable being that they can be seen as having defining power concerning a historical crime that never should be seen through a life-affirming lens. That's why overall context is so important when it comes to Holocaust dramas.

Having said that, it's also true that stories about those who risked their lives to save Jews deserve to be told, and few are more intriguing than those recounted in The Zookeeper's Wife.

Prior to the war, Warsaw's zoo was run by Antonina and Jan Zabinski. During the war, the Zabinskis managed to hide 300 Polish Jews at the zoo, using the zoo's facilities to conceal them from the Germans.

As a cover for their efforts, the Zabinskis turned the zoo into a pig farm. They convinced the Nazis that they could raise pigs to feed German soldiers. They would nourish the pigs with scraps collected from the Warsaw Ghetto. Jan made trips to the ghetto, where he covered Jews in garbage and smuggled them to safety.

On screen, Jessica Chastain plays Antonina Zabinski, a woman with a special affinity for animals. Johan Heldenbergh portrays her husband, Jan.

For reasons that may have more to do with international marketing than with historical authenticity, everyone in Zookeeper's Wife speaks English, employing a variety of accents with Eastern European flavor, an approach that already compromises the material.

It should also be noted that Chastain is a wonderful actress, but there are many fine Polish actresses who easily could have tackled this material.

Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) opens the movie with an idyllic passage in which we learn that the zoo functions as Antonina's Edenic paradise. She makes her morning rounds on a bicycle while a baby camel trots happily behind her. A couple of more clicks in the direction of cuteness and we'd be talking Dr. Dolittle.

It doesn't take long for the Germans to begin bombing the zoo as part of its invasion of Warsaw. Animals die, and Antonina, Jan and their young son (Timothy Radford) are terrorized.

Daniel Bruhl plays a Nazi zoologist who arranges for some of the zoo's best animals to be shipped to Germany for genetic experimentation. German soldiers shoot the rest.

Bruhl's character flirts with Antonina, who tries to keep his interest alive while warding off his most flagrant advances; she knows that this zoologist -- sort of an animal-oriented Mengele -- must think of her as an ally if she's going to continue her life-saving efforts.

Caro's treatment of ghetto life and of the Polish home army remains sketchy and not entirely satisfying.

The script has been tailored to showcase Chastain, who gives a credible performance. Portraying the character who does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to saving Jews, Heldenbergh mostly is asked to look grave. Bruhl's SS zoologist manages a neat trick: He's bland and menacing at the same time.

The Jews in the story become little more than props used to support Antonina's gentle heroism, although the story of a Jewish girl who's raped by German soldiers proves harrowing.

In all, The Zookeeper's Wife is a medium-grade drama that has been given the look and feel of a prestige offering.

If you want to see a remarkably shaded and far more agonizing story about the interaction between Poles and Jews during the war, try Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness, a movie that offers nuances and hard-core realities that Caro's effort doesn't begin to approach.

A movie about running for distance

Kevin Costner stars in a movie about an underdog cross-country team.

In many ways, McFarland, USA is a typical sports movie. You know the drill: A committed coach leads an underdog high school team to a state championship, and -- as cliche has it -- the crowd goes wild.

Typical, yes, but McFarland, USA separates itself from the pack by taking time to develop the social milieu surrounding the triumphs of McFarland High School's first cross-country team.

That's another way of saying that the movie brings us into the world of poor Mexican-American field workers who are stuck in a cycle of hard work for limited rewards.

Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider and North Country) provides the requisite sports inspiration, but also creates a realistic social context in which a downtrodden coach (Kevin Costner) can't succeed until he develops a real understanding of the California community in which he and his wife (Maria Bello) have landed.

Costner's Jim White begins the movie on a downward spiral. An explosive temper has gotten him fired from his job as a football coach at an Idaho high school. If he fails in McFarland, his career probably is over.

White must adjust to being one of the few Anglos in a solidly Mexican-American community where working the fields is regarded as more important than running in cross-country competitions.

That's not a statement about class preference, but a reflection of harsh economic realities. Struggling families need all the hands they can get, and kids often awaken at 4:30 a.m. so that they can put in a morning's work as pickers before school starts.

The proverbial fish out of water, White quickly gets crosswise with McFarland's head football coach, and loses his position as an assistant.

He begins to look even more depressed than usual. But during physical education classes, White notices that some of the school's young men have both speed and endurance. The inevitable lightbulb lights. White tries to interest his students in forming a cross-country team.

It requires time for White to persuade these young runners to take the sport seriously and for them to indoctrinate him into the ways of their community.

Costner isn't afraid to appear clueless. Having never coached cross-country before, White's feeling his way into a new arena. He's also learning from his charges, even as they learn from him.

At one point, White goes into the fields to discover precisely what his students contend with on a daily basis. Later, he decides to throw a quinceanera for his oldest daughter, who's turning 15.

Inspired by a real-life story, McFarland, USA grounds itself in dusty realism and also boasts appealing performances from its youthful cast.

McFarland, USA may not find its way into anyone's sports-movie hall of fame, but it's a well-intended and modest entertainment that appreciates the value of life in a close-knit community and has the decency to present its moments of triumph without beating us over the head -- at least not too hard.