Movie review: 'Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles' By Michael Wilmington Tribune movie critic

From "The Grapes of Wrath" to "Sideways," and from "La Strada" to "Kikujiro," films have always shown a definite affinity for stories that take place on the road. One of the most beautiful and touching road movies in recent years is "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," an intimate family and cross-cultural drama by the great Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, starring the great Japanese actor Ken Takakura.

It's Zhang's first movie since his spectacular action films "Hero" (2003) and "House of Flying Daggers" (2004), and of course it's quite different from either--though it's very much in the vein of Zhang's "The Road Home" and "Not One Less" (both 1999), movies in a neo-realist vein about simple people in poignant real-life situations.

Likewise Takakura, now 75, plays a role very different from the taciturn gangsters and other violent loners that helped make his legend in more than 200 films since the '50s. Here, he plays Gou-ichi Takata, an old but still vigorous man who travels to Tokyo from his small village to visit his estranged and now gravely ill son Ken-ichi (Kiichi Nakai), only to learn from his granddaughter (Shinobu Terajima) that Ken-ichi is dying of liver cancer and still so angry at his father's desertion of their family that he refuses now to speak to him.

Disturbed by his son's enduring hatred and approaching death, Takata decides to pay a pilgrimage to fulfill what seems to be his son's fondest wish: to film and record a virtuoso Chinese folk opera singer (Li Jiamin, playing a character with his own name) singing the classic story-song "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles."

What happens afterwards--Takata's journey to China turns into a series of mishaps and fiascoes--might be the stuff of outright comedy if not for the sadness of the situation and the wonderful gravity with which Takakura plays Takata. That's not to say the film isn't comic at times. But it's humor of a special, humane kind, like that of Charlie Chaplin or Anton Chekhov.

The troubles begin in small ways, then become an avalanche. Takata's translator Jasmine (Jiang Wen) displeases Takata, leaves at his request and can only help him by cell phone. His new translator, Lingo (Qiu Lin), can barely speak Japanese. Li Jiamin, as it turns out, has stabbed a man and now languishes in prison serving a three-year sentence; it is there that the opera will have to be filmed. But Li breaks down and can't sing out of sorrow at losing his own son, who is being cared for in a mountain village far away. And when Takata tries to find the boy and bring him back to his dad, further miscues and catastrophes await him.

Much like the succession of seemingly inevitable comic disasters that bedevil the wine-tasting buddies in "Sideways" or the hapless beauty- show family of "Little Miss Sunshine," these mounting problems reveal Takata's character and inner feelings. Zhang makes the pilgrim's anguish so real that the laughs sometimes stick in your throat.

As before, ex-cinematographer Zhang deftly directs his mixed cast of professionals and amateurs, framing the scenes and landscapes with such painterly mastery that a constant sense of life's beauty heightens the story's mood. The ending of "Riding Alone" is one of the saddest and most beautiful I've seen in any recent film.

Takakura, the one-time Yakuza movie king, is famous for his quiet, simmering charisma; not for nothing is he known as the Japanese Clint Eastwood. Zhang wrote this part for Takakura, and it becomes a career summation, a portrait of an outsider whose taciturn manner, we see, masks not coldness but an overwhelming sense of duty, guilt and compassion. In "Riding Alone," Zhang unites the cultures of both China and Japan. But this is a movie for all cultures and all people, for families and especially for those who have lost them. [email protected]

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'Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles'

Directed by Zhang Yimou; written by Zou Jingzhi; photographed by Zhao Xiaoding; edited by Cheng Long; production designed by Sun Li; music by Guo Wenjing; produced by Bill Kong, Xiu Jian, Zhang Weiping. In Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles. A Sony Pictures Classics release; opens Friday at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: PG (for mild thematic elements).

Gou-ichi Takata - Ken Takakura Rie Takata - Shinobu Terajima

Ken-ichi Takata - Kiichi Nakai

Li Jiamin - Li Jiamin

Lingo - Qiu Lin

Jasmine - Jiang Wen

Yang Yang - Yang Zhenbo