Alan Yang's Directorial Debut Tigertail Is A Mostly Solid Tale of a Life Stifled

Tigertail is the feature film directorial debut of Alan Yang, previously most famous for being the award-winning co-creator of the Netflix comedy Master of None. For Tigertail, Yang has taken inspiration from stories about his own father leaving Taiwan and coming to America.  This results in a movie about the fictional character Pin-Jui. We first meet Pin-Jui as a young child growing up with his grandmother in the fields of Taiwan. At this stage of his life, he navigates the uncertainty of where his mother is as well as government forces who see his very existence as a problem. It is in this period of his life that Pin-Jui is instilled lessons from his grandmother not to cry and to keep his focus on practical matters.


Such pearls of wisdom leave their mark on Pin-Jui, who we subsequently follow through various parts of his life. Yang's script for Tigertail cuts back-and-forth between sequences set in the present-day world where a middle-aged Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma) is struggling to connect with his daughter, Angela (Christine Ko). We also see extended flashbacks to a twenty-something Pin-Jui (here played by Hong Chi-Lee) as he works in a dangerous factory with his mother and, in his off time, engages in a romantic infatuation with Yuan (Joan Chen). In order to ensure his mother doesn't have to keep going back to a hostile workspace, Pin-Jui chooses to get married to a woman he barely knows, Zhenzhen (Fiona Fu), so that he may have the chance to go start a new life in New York City.

Tigertail intends to cover a lot of territory concerning the life of one man, all the while carrying a subdued slow-pace aesthetic. If there is a deficit in Yang's writing, it's that a longer runtime would have allowed more of the critical events in Pin-Jui's life a chance to breathe. His gradual decline in spirits in his time in America especially feels rushed. Pin-Jui goes from listening to some of his favorite peppy vinyl records to casually dismissing them as items that can be tossed out in the space of a few minutes. This issue is compounded by Yang's decision to keep the proceedings so muted to match the psychological headspace of middle-aged Pin-Jui. This approach has its fair share of benefits. But in Tigertail's more rushed moments, this muted style of storytelling means the viewer doesn't get a chance to even connect with what's briefly transpiring on-screen.

That having been said, Tigertail's subdued nature has for more plusses than minuses. For one thing, the emptiness of Pin-Jui's modern life is well-realized, particularly in regard to how Yang frames shots depicting this character alone in his home. The vast amount of empty space surrounding Pin-Jui as he eats dinner speaks volumes about how lonely this character is without ever uttering a line of dialogue. Opting for restraint also benefits Tigertail on a narrative level. Alan Yang rejects the notion of creating drama out of extremely over-the-top scenarios. There aren't any secret lovers or grandiose twists that cause a rift in the marriage between Pin-Jui and Zhenzhen, ditto for the circumstances leading to Pin-Jui and Angela's fractured relationship.

Instead, more mundane sources of conflict emerge that inform the tormented dynamics Pin-Jui has with the people in his life. It's particularly interesting how Tigertail depicts much of his problems to stem from his constant defaulting to pragmatic solutions rather than personally fulfilling ones. The best result of Tigertail deciding to examine so much of one character's life is how it allows the audience a chance to see the long-term consequences of this particular defect in Pin-Jui's personality.  Ripple effects of his choices made out of practicality rather than passion just keep on going well into the modern-day segments of the story. Yang's screenwriting manifests such consequences in a dramatically engaging fashion.

The same can be said for the lead performance of Tzi Ma as the oldest version of Pin-Jui. Ma proves thoroughly convincing in depicting Pin-Jui as a man who speaks and emotes as little as possible. He's a person whose life has left him with a hardened shell that puts him at an immense distance with anyone who crosses his path, including his own daughter. Ma impressively renders that kind of personality in a manner that garners audience sympathy rather than immediately turning us off from him. Partially this is due to narration that Ma delivers over the various segments of Tigertail that offer us a glimpse into a more wistful version of Pin-Jui he was told long ago by his grandmother to bury deep inside himself. While Tigertail has its share of shortcomings, Alan Yang's directorial debut offers plenty of elements that stand out in a positive way, particularly in regards to an outstanding turn from Tzi Ma.