I admire Ang Lee's Pushing Hands because it takes its story up to a point where a more conventional film would have found an easy resolution to the plot, and then it doesn't go there. Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), an elderly tai chi instructor, has come to America to live with Alex (Bozhao Wang) and Martha (Deb Snyder), his son and daughter-in-law. Mr. Chu speaks no English and Martha speaks no Mandarin, and when they're left alone together during the day, tensions flare. She's trying to write a novel - her first has just been published - but his presence in the small suburban house proves a constant distraction, a irritant that causes tension not only between Martha and her father-in-law, but also between husband and wife. Mr. Chu teaches tai chi at a local community center, where he makes friends with Mrs. Chen (Lai Wang), an elderly widow who likewise lives with her Americanized children. When things reach an explosive point at home, Alex decides to try making a match between his father and Mrs. Chen. Things seem to be going well in that direction: Both families go on a picnic together, and Mr. Chu uses some of his tai chi training to help Mrs. Chen with a pain she has in her shoulder. But just as we can see the conventional happy ending on the horizon, Mrs. Chen rebels against the matchmaking, expressing her own bitterness at being manipulated by others. This avoidance of sentimentality is what strengthens Lee's film, his first. It's an enormously likable movie, with a couple of flaws: Martha is written and played with more shrill edginess than is entirely credible. Couldn't an obviously intelligent woman married to a man who speaks Mandarin and whose small son is learning it have managed to learn at least a few phrases to communicate with her father-in-law? And Alex's destructive rage - he destroys the kitchen when the tensions get too high - feels a bit over the top.

I do really love how when it comes to Ang Lee, there are no two films he's made that feel completely similar. He's up there with Spielberg when it comes to covering a wide variety of genres and tones, and maybe slightly more consistent, too. Pushing Hands was his debut, and while it reminded me a little of Eat Drink Man Woman in parts, it was still pretty different overall, in terms of its story and how it wasn't afraid to present a slightly heightened reality at times, too.

This does mean it's not as well balanced as Lee's 1994 film (and it doesn't hit as hard emotionally, either), but it does stand as a strong debut, and a film I mostly enjoyed quite a bit. It's a tiny bit rough around the edges, but only when you compare it to what Ang Lee was capable of doing just a few years later. Considering he was starting out here, it's a very confident and well-made debut.

Not all the humour hits, and some scenes end a bit abruptly. And as mentioned, the detours it almost takes into becoming a martial arts movie are unexpected (but will probably end up being one of the most memorable things about it). At its core though, it's a movie about family drama and the difficulties of growing old, and I think when it focuses on those things, it's quite effective. Lee's an empathetic filmmaker, and you always feel something for his main characters, and even in his debut, that's no exception.

While it's not one of his best films, I think it's still pretty easy to recommend and enjoy. I look forward to watching The Wedding Banquet soon, as I think that was his second film, and I've heard the general consensus is it's almost as good as the excellent Eat Drink Man Woman.

It has been a month since Beijing-born Tai Chi master Chu has been living in the suburbs of New York City. But that has caused inconvenience to his American daughter-in-law Martha, who is a writer herself. She is having writer's block while working on her second novel, with the presence of her father-in-law doing his tai chi nearby. She had initially tried to tolerate his presence despite the language barrier between them, but it never stopped her on wanting to find a new home for the family which also includes her Chinese-born husband Alex and son Jeremy, but without the presence of her father-in-law.

Chu would come to teach tai chi at a local community centre where he would also meet the cooking teacher Mrs. Chen who specialises in the teaching of making dumplings. There was the skirmishes as the tai chi class has to share their room with the cooking class as the cooking class had often being interrupted by what was going on nearby where one day, one of the students from Chu's tai chi class would knock over a plate of dumplings waiting to be steamed. Chu would come to feel bad about it, as he sets out to find a way to compensate Mrs. Chen. But before that, he would learn from her as they were having the remaining dumplings that she had been living in the United States with her daughter and her family for a year after her second husband has died not long after escaping China to Taiwan from the Cultural Revolution.

But back home, the contrasting lifestyles and habits between Chu and Martha has come to put Alex on the spot. For Alex in between those times and beyond, it was relooking into his own family with the presence of his elderly father in the house who had briefly lost his way when having a walk in the street and how he himself would come to settle in the United States.

As Chu would come to get along well with Mrs. Chen where the two would come to find themselves being stuck in the similar predicament over the lives their respective children have to come to get used to in the United States, there would be two defining moments for Chu and his family which would shape how Chu come to see his new life in the United States. Trying to tend to Martha who was having stomach pains before she would be admitted to the hospital for a few days and the decision to move out of his own accord before something happens to him at the Chinese restaurant where he worked which would alarm Alex and Martha.

The cultural and lifestyle differences references in the film are there from almost the start, as exemplified in Chu and Martha. Chu is trying to cling on what he has always know before he left China to join his now-grown up son Alex in the United States through especially the tai chi he practices and the American daughter-in-law Martha who came from a very different set of upbringing, with both trying to get Alex's attention at the same time who tries to blend in both his American way of life while remembering the presence of his father in the house.

There are the comical moments and the tender ones as well, especially on Chu telling Alex of what really happened to the family in Beijing at the height of the Cultural Revolution when Alex would be sent to live in the United States all on his own. It is a film which makes one think especially for those who are straddling in between two different cultures on when is the time to let go and the time to compromise, where the end result for either scenario is something both parties have to come to accept. Anyone who has been through what the Alex in the film has to go through will know the struggles of trying to bridge the past and the present together.