Behind Jet Li's Fearless
Jet Li talks about his return from rumored retirement to play Huo Yuan-jia, one of the founders of wushu, an acrobatic martial art that Li has studied since childhood.
By David Chute
You can't blame fans of the gravity-defying martial arts wizard Jet Li for feeling a little befuddled these days. A little over a year ago it was being trumpeted in the fan press that Li was planning to "turn in his kung fu shoes for good" after finishing his latest action flick, a turn-of-the-century bio-pic about a gentleman named Huo Yuan-jia — a real guy, though his career as one of the founders of the modern Chinese form of acrobatic martial artistry known as wushu is mostly shrouded in legend. The casting made sense, because Li had first won national fame in China as an adolescent wushu champion, before being cast in his first movie at the tender age of 17.
If anything Huo was a figure of even more iconic significance in the history of martial arts cinema: he was the revered teacher, foully murdered, whose death was ferociously avenged by Bruce Lee in the best of his kung fu sagas, The Chinese Connection (1972). Li had once played the Bruce Lee hero in a re-make of The Chinese Connection, Gordon Chan's exhilarating head-banger Fist of Legend (1994), so there is a nice symmetry in the notion of backtracking now, as a 42-year-old, to play the revered sifu (teacher) whose passing marked the end of an era.
But describing the movie as a final chapter and as a personal turning point may have been a tactical mistake. Li has distracted for the better part of the past year trying to explain what he really means, and only intermittently succeeding. When Lions Gate's contemporary action picture Rogue was announced this summer, with Li cast as an ace assassin targeted by FBI agent Jason Statham, querulous fans jumped on the movie's IMDB discussion board to vent their confusion: "I thought Jet Li quit making action movies?" one of them griped. The trailers for the dubbed and re-edited American version of the Hua Yuan-jia film, Fearless, which recently opened in the U.S., describe the movie as Jet Li's "final martial arts epic," and Li insists that he this should be taken in a very narrow and literal sense: while he may continue to make action pictures (and, he hopes, also romances and comedies) he will make no more movies about the lore and legend of the traditional Chinese martial arts. "I put all my beliefs in martial arts into Fearless," he says, and then, in a spasm of frankness, he warns his fans not to judge his intentions by the truncated 104 minute cut being released stateside: "If you see [Ronny Yu's] directors cut, all 2 hours and 30 minutes, you will understand more and see what is wushu in Jet Li's heart."
Putting wushu aside, in any sense, is a major life passage for a champion like Li, whose childhood and adolescence were consumed and defined almost by exclusively his skill in one of the most demanding athletic disciplines of earth. For almost two years, Li he has been posting installments of an autobiography-in-progress on his web site at www.jetli.com. Far from being a mischievous child who had to be reined in by the quasi-military rigors of traditional wushu training, Li asserts that he was a "poster child for obedience" who got near-perfect grades and was even appointed a monitor at school, lording it over the other kids. His wushu training began in 1971, at eight, during a mandatory summer session of instruction designed to keep vacationing school children off the Beijing streets. When the session adjourned in the fall Li was one of only 20 kids out of his summer class of 1,000, and the only first grader, who was ordered to continue training every day after school at the Beijing Sports and Exercise School.
"Being selected out of a thousand made you rather famous in your class," Li writes. And the truth is, there has never been a time since in which Jet Li was not famous. A year after he was tapped for extra training, Li was drafted into the first national wushu competition held in China since the practice of martial arts was banned at the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
As Li writes, "since there would be no official placings or prizes, it wasn't even a standard competition — more like a grand demonstration of [practice] forms. Only a single award would be issued: the best performer was to be recognized for 'Excellence.'" Li won the award, becoming, at the age of nine, the only officially named national martial arts champion in China in over a decade. He became at that moment not only a sports star but a national icon, a phase that culminated in an audience with then-Premier Zhou Enlai. In 1974 Li was one of 30 students selected for the first official national wushu team, which toured the United States and performed on the White House lawn for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. And when the authorities decided to lift the ban on making martial arts movies, this smiling, eager-to-please 17-year-old, already a five-time national champion, was right at the top of their list.
Li plays in reluctant wushu student in Shaolin Temple (1982), hiding out at the fabled "font of all martial arts" and eventually learning enough to save the life of an emperor. Shaolin Temple happens to be one of only a handful of classic martial arts movies that is based on actual history rather than sectarian mythology, and its adventure story structure, like a Robert Lewis Stevenson thriller in ancient China, made it huge hit in China and much of the rest of Asia, and with kung fu fans around the world. (There's a case to be made for it as one of the three or four most purely entertaining action movies ever made.)
Jet Li's athletic accomplishments have been astonishing right from the beginning. It is never about brute force with him but about mastery, about perfect control, about doing the seemingly impossible and never breaking a sweat. But Li's connection with his audience isn't exclusively about fighting. A good deal of it hinges on the fact that when he isn't squaring off with some goon he can still resemble a flustered little boy. Even as a well-off film actor in his 40s, devoted to his children and to his second marriage to Hong Kong actress Nina Li Chi, Jet Li still manages to convey the unassuming shyness moviegoers fell in love with when he played a green Shaolin novice in his teens. It came through strongly twenty years later in his first Hollywood solo vehicle, the Joel Silver production Romeo Must Die (2000), especially in his low-key courtship scenes with the late singer/actress Aaliyah.
Li seems to have banked on his inherent likeability to carry him through and keep the audience his corner through the series of sometimes mindlessly brutal American pictures he made to establish himself in Hollywood, such as The One (2001) and Cradle 2 the Grave (2003), so that when he finally does land a role worthy not just of his strength but of his strength of character, such as the title role in Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), the transition feels seamless. There is some evidence that Li has engineered this youthful persona fairly carefully, encouraging his fans to believe that he is just the same in real life: "I can feel very brave through all the action scenes," he has said, "but when a girl comes close to me my face turns red because I'm so shy."
Jet Li left most of his boyishness behind when he made Fearless. The movie's plot massages the very few facts we know about Huo Yuan-jai into a psychological drama that resembles a standard kung fu "training for revenge" picture only in its broadest broad outlines — and or course in its staging of some of the brawniest and most convincing "classical" martial arts encounters ever photographed. Li does the best acting of his career as the young Huo, arrogantly proud of his martial skills and seething with a resentment whose source is never entirely clear. Although he has worked all his life to achieve martial supremacy he feels hollow, and his frustration only seems to build. It is only when his anger spills over into a horrendous act of violence, and this in turn leads to a life-crushing act of retribution, Huo is driven to consider a different manner of living. After a sojourn in the sylvan countryside, living as a clean in healthy peasant in a picture perfect village, Huo returns home to Shanghai with a higher vision of the universal spiritual dimensions of the martial arts.
The Hong Kong director Ronny Yu (The Bride With White Hair), hand picked by Li to direct Fearless, a pet project he had been mulling over for almost a decade, thinks he understands why the actor is so strongly drawn to Huo's story. "My feeling," Yu says, "is that this movie is almost like Jet Li's own story. When he started out as a young boy he didn't know why he had to practice Chinese martial arts. It was just a means to make money for his family. Because he comes from a poor family, and at that time in China if you had a child in a martial arts school the state gave you money. Jet told me told me that his teacher just kept telling him to win, to win, to win, as if that was the purpose of everything, the meaning of life. And then at a certain point he began wondering if there was something more, just as Huo Yuan-jia does in the film."
The story of Huo Yuan-jia and the organization he founded, the Jing Wu ("pure martial") Athletic Association, is often cited as an aspect among many (and a relatively minor one at that) of the modernizing and Westernizing impulses of China's turn-of-the-century Republican reformers. Huo made his contribution by attempting to unify the Chinese martial arts, by integrating the best elements of all the schools, to create a new "rationalized" synthesis.
"Traditionally," Jet Li explains, "there are hundreds of different martial arts styles and centers. Each center only teaches their own style, and maybe only to family members. They pass down these skills as family secrets. Huo Yuan-jia was the first person to open a school to show his family secrets to the public. He also joined all the different martial styles and centers together. I agree with his belief and these are my beliefs as well."
Li conforms reports that his decision to move forward with his long-cherished plan of telling Huo's story was prompted by a news report to the effect that 280,000 Chinese youths commit suicide every year:
"That is true. I heard this news in 2003. I'm a Buddhist, so I suffered knowing that teenagers who don't understand life give up so easily. From my life experience, I know that everybody has their own challenges, rich or poor. Everyone has pain, just on different levels. That's why I wanted, through this story, to give the message that at each level you will have problems if you don't understand life. Be brave and know that the biggest enemy is yourself. Ego, fear, and courage are things we all struggle with. Don't complain that life isn't fair. The idea is that no one can choose when they are born, but we must all be brave enough to follow through to the last step."
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