Great Performances Nearly Save ‘The Lady’ From Remarkable Convention

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Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – I love every decision made by the great Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis in Luc Besson’s historical biopic “The Lady” and yet I cannot recommend the film. It is a wild understatement to call the film conventional and those who did not know that it was from the director of such personality-heavy films as “La Femme Nikita” and “The Fifth Element” would never guess that the man behind it was anything more than a director for hire. To be fair, Besson does draw the best out of his two leads but “The Lady” is a film about an extraordinary woman. So why is it such an ordinary film?

Yeoh plays the legendary peacemaker, leader, and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a woman who returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother at the same time that her homeland was undergoing remarkable upheaval. Rebels had taken over the country and were performing rights abuses and general horror on a regular basis. Aung San Suu Kyi became their leader because she was the daughter of Aung San, a former leader who was executed in 1947. In 1988, she becomes more than just a political leader, she becomes a social force for change and for good in her country.

Blue Like Jazz
Photo credit: Sony Pictures

Naturally, she had more than a few enemies. Not only was her life under constant threat but her decision to lead her people to freedom basically came at the expense of her home life. Her husband, author Michael Aris (Thewlis) had to stay in England with their sons and it wasn’t long before Suu Kyi was put under house arrest in Burma. She couldn’t go back to England to see her family for she knew that the military would never allow her back into the country that needed her so badly. She sacrificed everything for her people and for the cause of freedom around the world, becoming the first woman in Asia to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Clearly, there’s a notable story here of a modern hero, which makes one wonder why her saga has been told with such a distinct lack of character. “The Lady” feels not unlike a Wikipedia entry brought to life. It hits the plot points that it needs to and Yeoh and Thewlis find emotion in their tragic love story, but most of the storytelling here is so conventional that it approaches network TV mini-series. The love story is clearly where Besson, Yeoh, and Thewlis’s greatest interest lies but the rest of the film becomes inert. In particular, the political machinations feel very surface level. We never really see why Suu Kyi made the decision she did to start or what she meant to her people. Or what they meant to her. All of this is given a lot of lip service – there are many scenes of the military trying to damage her role in the country (they can’t just kill her or risk her becoming even more powerful as a martyr), but none of them resonate beyond basic storytelling beats.

What does resonate, however, is the reminder that Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis are simply fantastic performers. Yeoh looks radiant and determined, never more so than in her scenes with Thewlis, in which both actors seem to raise their craft simply by working together. They’re fantastic, full-bodied, believable actors. The tragedy is that they are giving such detailed, nuanced performances in a film that doesn’t seem to really need them.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com