Michelle Yeoh in The Lady. Courtesy Cohen Media.

Director Luc Besson was once the wunderkind of action movies, from his stylish debut Subway through La Femme Nikita to the operatic excesses of Leon: The Professional. But somewhere during his career, the Besson name no longer guaranteed thrills. His new film, a biopic inauspiciously called The Lady, suffers from a bland title, but that is not the only sign of mellowing.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh) was born to Burmese national hero Aung San, who helped win his country’s independence from British colonial rule and founded the Burmese Army, before being assassinated in 1947. Post-independence, the Burmese government generally embraced Aung San’s ideals, but the rise of a military regime in the late 1980s led to a series of atrocities against Burmese protestors. Aung San Suu Kyi had left her homeland to marry Tibetan and Himalayan studies expert Michael Aris (David Thewliss), but found herself drawn back home, a reluctant but steadfast symbol of peace and democracy.

Yeoh and Thewliss play a courageous power couple, but as is often the way with biopics, the road to turmoil is paved with highly polished production values. The actors come from colorful careers which resonate in this picture, but mostly in the feeling that the mighty have fallen or at least been tamed. Yeoh’s days as a Hong Kong action heroine and James Bond sidekick are long gone; so are Thewliss’s incendiary performances as in Mike Leigh’s Naked. The Lady covers a tumultuous period in Burmese history. But the history of the director and his leads gives it the subtext of time passing and diminishing us with age.

Cinematographer Thierry Arbogast has worked with Besson since La Femme Nikita, and his swooping camerawork is worthy of the director’s lively past. But as much as I hate hand-held camerawork, this is a movie that could have used some grit. Blood is spilled in The Lady; political prisoners are kept in dank cells, and cockroaches scurry along the floors of Suu Kyi’s childhood home. But despite the volatile pedigree of its cinematic principals, this revolution has the air of a Merchant Ivory picture. There’s a lot at stake both politically and personally – this is yet another film where a leader must choose between greater ideals and family. But despite the turmoil and danger, the movie feels strangely unthreatening.

David Thewliss in The Lady. Courtesy Cohen Media

Still, Suu Kyi’s role was as a peacemaker standing up to violence. Yeoh is slightly built, and her fragile looks give her character an appropriate vulnerability. This makes her legendary confrontation with a gang of gun-wielding thugs that much more powerful — and it provides a hint of her former kick ass days.

Thewliss is not as well served. He plays the role of an Oxford professor with the expressions of an abused hound, his personal conflicts mostly represented by his inability to make a proper pot of rice and a fatal bout with cancer. It’s well-meaning Oscar-bait that anyone who has followed his career would think he’d never stoop to. But the old Thewliss spark seems to appear in his dual role as Michael Aris’s brother Anthony. In scenes where Thewliss appears as both Michael Aris and his brother, it is his brother’s eyes that show a bit of the old rage, as if impatiently waiting to be let out from under his prosthetic goiter. It makes one long for the actor to play a two-headed monster.

Late in the film, after Suu Kyi’s begins to achieve her defiant rise to power in her homeland, Aris reads to his wife a litany of the nicknames she has been given around the world. Among these is “The Steel Orchid.” What a great title that would have been, but alas, it is the road not taken. The Lady passes the time, and may resonate more for those who know her story. But as a history of passion and violence, it’s victory is the mildest of spoils.

The Lady
Directred by Luc Besson
Written by Rebecca Frayn
Starring Michelle Yeoh, David Thewliss.
Running time 132 minutes
Rated R for violence including some bloody images
Opens today at Bethesda Row