“No one remembers in this country. No one
remembers anything.” – Stanley White
A
commercial and critical debacle on the scale of Heaven’s Gate (1980), which helped topple a Hollywood studio, would
be a career killer for most filmmakers but not for Michael Cimino who came
roaring back five years later with the controversial adaptation of Robert Daley’s novel Year of the Dragon
(1985). Co-written by Oliver Stone, it starred Mickey Rourke as a
hard-charging, unrepentant racist and sexist cop that decides to battle
organized crime in New York City’s Chinatown.
The film
polarized critics, failed to make back its $22 million budgets and angered
members of the Chinese American and Asian American communities that blasted it
for being racist, sexist and xenophobic but Cimino defended his film by arguing
that it dealt with racism and was not actually racist. This did little to quell
the controversy, which hurt its box office performance.
Cimino
immediately immerses us in the sights and sounds of Chinatown with a
cacophonous celebration in the streets filled with people. Amidst this chaos,
one of the local crime bosses is killed in broad daylight sparking speculation
that a gang war has begun with young punks moving against their elders. This
gets the attention of the New York Police Department who install Stanley White
(Rourke) as the new police captain of Chinatown.
He
immediately adopts a more proactive approach to crime by barging into newly
appointed kingpin Harry Yung’s (Victor Wong) office and telling him and his
underlings to keep the young gangs under control, laying down the law in a
superbly delivered speech:
“You
think gambling, extortion, corruption are kosher because it’s a thousand years
old? Well, all this thousand years old stuff, it’s a lot of shit to me. This is
America you’re livin’ in, it’s 200 years old so you better get your clocks
fixed.”
This
tactic doesn’t endear him to his superior, Bukowski (Raymond J. Barry) who
scoffs at White’s theory that the Chinese gangs, if they go unchecked, will
make in-roads into other boroughs. It’s a fascinating fiery battle of wills as
White argues that the reason the Chinese gangs don’t get busted for trafficking
heroin is because they’re smart. Bukowski dismisses this notion and tells White
to go after the youth gangs whom he regards as nothing more than troublemakers.
One
memorable exchange has Bukowski tell White, “You’re not in Vietnam here,
Stanley,” to which he replies, “There, I never saw the goddamn enemy. Here,
they’re right in front of my eyes. They got no place to hide, no jungle.” In
some respects, he has a point and in other ways he doesn’t. New York is its own
jungle made of concrete and steel that is just as dangerous and unforgiving as
the one in Vietnam as White will find out later on.
Cimino
provides valuable insight into White’s troubled home life and his turbulent
relationship with his wife Connie (Caroline Kava) who wants to have a child;
the only problem is he is never around because of his workaholic tendencies.
They’ve grown apart and, as a result, he finds himself increasingly attracted
to beautiful young Chinese American television reporter Tracy Tzu (Ariane Koizumi). Their initial meet-cute starts off as a history lesson as White
attempts to dazzle her with his knowledge of Chinese history and the ills that
plague Chinatown, and it culminates in a bloody shoot-out as a brazen youth
gang riddle the restaurant they’re in full of bullets.
Meanwhile,
the leaders of the Chinese triad societies have their own problems. The youth
gang attacks have made them look weak and no new revenues are coming in. It’s
time for new leadership and the ambitious Joey Tai (John Lone), a bridge
between the gangs and the elders, has a plan for the Chinese mafia to re-exert
their influence in Chinatown and beyond thereby setting up an inevitable
confrontation between him and White but not before a series of escalating
attacks against each other.
Year of the Dragon is a snapshot of the
criminal underworld in 1980s Chinatown, showing how things work in a way that
is fascinating to watch. Cimino doesn’t pull any punches and presents flawed
characters on both sides of the law. This is best exemplified by Mickey
Rourke’s obsessed cop. The actor is not afraid to play unlikable characters and
White is one for the ages – he’s racist, sexist and manages to piss off just
about everyone that he comes in contact with, including his wife who tells him
at one point, “You used me up, Stanley and then you burned me down. And I was a
rock,” but he is good at his job, which is all he has left. Even that begins to
slip through his fingers as his increasingly aggressive tactics burn his
bridges within the police department and the Chinese community. It is Rourke’s
natural charisma that makes White an interesting character. Watch how the actor
works the room when White confronts Harry Yung and how he controls the space,
or the scene where he gives a squad of cops a pep talk – it’s a masterclass in
acting.
Cimino
and Oliver Stone’s screenplay crackles with intensity and is chock-a-block with
tough guy dialogue while also acting as a searing expose of the Chinese triads
by pitting two strong-willed men against each other, leaving plenty of bodies
in their respective wakes. The script goes to great lengths to show how the
drug trade works, like how Joey gets his heroin directly from Southeast Asia,
bypassing the Italian mafia who has always marginalized them. You certainly
feel Stone’s politics blasting through his pulpy prose. Year of the Dragon is the cinematic explosion of Cimino and Stone’s
collective ids writ large over every frame of this gritty, visceral opus (with
a dash of Sidney Lumet cop procedural for good measure).
Coming
off writing the screenplay for Scarface
(1983), Oliver Stone was depressed at being unable to get personal films like Platoon (1986) made. He was contacted by
filmmaker Michael Cimino who was adapting Robert Daley’s book Year of the Dragon for Dino de
Laurentiis. He had read and was impressed with Stone’s script for Platoon and wanted him to co-write the
script for Year of the Dragon. Cimino
thought that if Stone worked for a lower than usual fee, de Laurentiis might
finance Platoon. Stone told him that
no one cared about the Vietnam War anymore but Cimino disagreed. Stone
remembers, “It was Michael who convinced me that the climate was right for it.”
Stone met
with de Laurentiis and he agreed to write Year
of the Dragon if the mogul financed Platoon
(he later reneged on this agreement with Stone). Cimino and Stone conducted a
lot of research for the film, interviewing anybody who would talk to them about
gangs and heroin dealing in New York’s Chinatown, but it wasn’t easy. Stone
said:
“We got
information finally from a dissident gangster group. These were guys who were
on the outs and very unhappy. They took us to Atlantic City and showed us the
inner workings of the gambling world, and also showed us their side of what was
going on in Chinatown.”
This
connection was provided by a line producer by the name of Alex Ho who had been
working for de Laurentiis for two years. He remembered:
“One time
Oliver and Michael wanted to see this gambling house where only Chinese people
are allowed to enter. So this policeman who was really nice to us busted one of
the gambling joints that night so we could see what it was like…Another night
Michael wanted to see what happens when someone is shot with a shotgun, so we
spent the whole night sitting in an ambulance.”
For the
protagonist, Stone suggested changing his name to Stanley White, after a police
detective friend he knew from another project. White gave them permission to
use his name and a lot of his “eccentricities.” Stone, however, was not happy
with how de Laurentiis interfered with the ending of the film. While White had
two women in his life, so did Joey Tai – one in Hong Kong and one in New York.
Stone said:
“In a moment
of sentimentality, he brings the Chinese wife to the States and the Mickey
Rourke character finds out about it. So, after he can’t get him legally with a
bust or a wiretap, he busts him for bigamy.”
De
Laurentiis made Cimino change the ending to a more conventional shoot-out,
which Stone did not like. The filmmaker said that Cimino also ran into problems
casting the role of Stanley White:
“We went
to several people, but they didn’t want the part. In some cases, it was because
of Michael’s reputation after Heaven’s
Gate, but also most actors didn’t care for the character. He’s a
right-winger. He’s a racist. That is the way the character was conceived and
written. He’s sexist on top of it. You had to have a big pair of balls to play
that part.”
Cimino shot
on location in North Carolina, recreating nearly all of the New York setting
there at great expense. Ho remembered:
“Like
there were two Mercedes that were to be in crashes. There was a 380 and a 450,
and I said, ‘Could I buy a 380 and then just change the number to 450 for the
crash scene?’ And Michael said, ‘No.’ That was like ten or fifteen thousand
dollars.”
Not
surprisingly, Year of the Dragon
divided critics. In her review for The
New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The actors fare particularly badly
under such circumstances. Mr. Rourke, who almost always generates a relaxed,
knowing magnetism, is entirely lost in the underwritten role of a middle-aged
policeman.” The Los Angeles Times’
Sheila Benson wrote, “Year of the Dragon
has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen
for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled
up, seemingly out of nowhere.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “Cimino might make a good movie
if he were forced to shoot someone else’s script, and banned from hiring
extras, but he’ll never do it – he’s an auteur, and our best example of
auteurism’s limits.” Finally, the Chicago
Tribune’s Gene Siskel wrote, “For all of its excesses, Year of the Dragon is a solid entertainment. It marks director
Cimino as a man to watch now not for his spend-thrift ways but for the size of
his vision.”
Year of the Dragon opened in 982 theaters
on August 16, 1985 and was met with harsh criticism and protests by the Asian
community in Hollywood, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and
Boston. They objected to the racist and sexist attitudes expressed in the film.
Many felt that it perpetuated Asian stereotypes. Judy Chu, an instructor of
Asian-American studies at UCLA, said that the film “only reinforces the
stereotype that Asians have no value for love and no sense of integrity…Even
the newswoman is a stereotype. She is a new version of an old stereotype of the
Geisha girl.” Even Richard Daley, the author of the novel, which it was based
on, became an outspoken critic of the film: “When I read the script, I wanted
to cry. I thought about taking out full-page ads…Dissociating myself from
Cimino’s work. It is offensive to anybody.” Eventually, a disclaimer was placed
before the film.
Stone
dismissed criticism of the portrayal of Chinese people in the film: “The thing
critics never realized is that the Chinese were at that time the biggest
importers of heroin in this country. They outdid the Mafia, but nobody knew
about it because they did it quietly.” Cimino also addressed the controversy,
saying, “The film was accused of racism, but they didn’t pay attention to what
people say in the film. It’s a film which deals with racism, but it’s not a
racist film. To deal with this sort of subject, you must inevitably reveal its
tendencies.”
While Year of the Dragon features several
racist characters it isn’t a racist film. Cimino isn’t afraid to acknowledge
the existence of such people and those kinds of ugly sentiments. He lets many
of the Chinese characters speak in their native tongues and espouse their
history in America, shedding light on decades of horrible treatment. If anything,
Cimino’s film is a savage indictment of such attitudes showing how they lead
down a destructive path.
Instead
of playing it safe in the hopes of getting back in the good graces of
Hollywood, Cimino stayed true to his artistic sensibilities and delivered a
hard-hitting crime drama that asks difficult questions and offers no easy
answers. Year of the Dragon is an
ugly film that forces you to engage it on its own terms and there’s a
refreshing honesty to this approach. It flew in the face of the rah-rah,
America is great sentiments of movies like Rambo:
First Blood Part II (1985), Rocky IV
(1985), and Top Gun (1986). Cimino’s
film exposes an America that is rotten to the core and built on a foundation of
thousands upon thousands of bodies – people that died anonymously. Is it any
wonder it failed at the box office? You don’t come out of Year of the Dragon feeling good but sometimes that’s okay, too.
Sure, White got his man and got the girl at the end, but it’s a hollow victory
at best and one could argue that it didn’t change much. At least he tried and
Cimino admires the attempt.
SOURCES
Camy,
Gerard; Viviani, Christian. “Entretien avec Cimino.” Jeune cinema.
December/January 1985/1986.
Horn,
John. “MGM/UA May Insert Dragon
Disclaimer.” Los Angeles Times. August 28, 1985.
Riordan,
James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone.
Hyperion. 1995.
