"The Grandmaster" pits time against its first truly formidable foil, wisdom. The people in Wong's films are often flailing, scrambling and ducking away from time's ravages as they try to live and love, but in "The Grandmaster" they have a complement of disciplines called the martial arts to steady them. Various schools of kung fu teach characters how to maintain poise and balance in battles of every sort.

Tony Leung, who plays the legendary wing chun master Ip Man (whose students included Bruce Lee), stands rooted like a tree. He never makes an extraneous move, never wastes words on empty ceremony or sentiment. The other master martial artists in the film are the same way: trees that bend and sway in the storm and could even be cut down but are almost impossible to uproot. "The Grandmaster" is a drunken love letter to experience, which helps us survive, and wisdom, which helps us face aging, loss and, ultimately, the abyss. Wong, who was called the coolest director in the world when he was much younger, is now 57. This film is about a man like him, who has proven himself in the world and enters mid-life exuding a new, sage kind of cool.

It's evident in his close-ups, which often frame his actors as if they were national monuments. That might sound staid, but in context, the effect is as electrifying as any of the celebrated high-speed, slo-mo, super-saturated images of Wong's youth.

I haven't seen the 130-minute Hong Kong cut of "The Grandmaster" or the fabled four-hour rough cut but I do sense that the 108 minute version entering American theaters is a mere trailer for something grander and deeper. The film I saw moves, but often as if prodded along, reality television/cop-show style. This artificial propulsion hits several speed bumps of explanatory inter-titles that I suspect were inserted just to avoid including corresponding scenes that ate up running time.

It feels like an insult to American audiences. At this point, the self-fulfilling prophecy that Americans are too dim, antsy and self-absorbed to sit still for meditative films has almost become international law. Filmmakers now agree with the market research department that most filmgoers here, only a couple of generations away from "The Godfather" and presently committed to long-form, subtly complex television like "Breaking Bad," somehow won't accept a film steeped in genre if it isn't paced like "Smurfs 2." How much of this received wisdom is simply disinformation from bottom-line corporate executives who hastily interpret box office data to justify lazy, fast-buck attempts at guaranteed blockbusters? It's the same industrious ignorance that says Third World audiences prefer graphic violence and crude humor, as if those were the only universal emotions.

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