Spiked

Spike Lee has never operated on the principle that “enough is enough” – he always goes for “just too much.”  Sometimes his subject requires it, and too much is the only way to go, but sometimes, he overpowers a perfectly decent little movie with bombast.  In light of his two well-regarded films in 2020, both in the top ten of this critics’ poll, I revisited a couple of career peaks to re-assess him at this best.

Da 5 Bloods I reviewed here earlier, little suspecting it would be receiving all sorts of award consideration at the end of the year.  But I am much more enthusiastic about David Byrne’s American Utopia (MC-93, HBO), his film direction of the Broadway stage show created by the former Talking Heads frontman and all-round aesthete (I remember an installation of his as the very first exhibition at MassMoCA in 1996).  The show itself is a visual, aural, somatic experience of great intensity, with music, dance, and exultant percussion creating a spectacle that Spike transfers to the screen with panache.  And a bit of his typical excess, in contrast to the perfect stage-to-screen transfer of Hamilton, in a year when Broadway itself was shut down.  Just because you’ve got a dozen cameras recording doesn’t mean you have to use all the angles; the busyness of Lee’s direction sometimes detracts from the show, whereas Hamilton’s always seemed to highlight just where your attention should go. To compound the invidious comparisons, I revisited Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, and appreciated his direction of a Talking Heads show from 1984.  One thing I can say for sure is that David Byrne’s energy somehow has not diminished over more than three decades, but he’s made major progress with choreographers and set designers.  Having fallen in love with the Color Guard championships, he arranged a concert and subsequent film called Contemporary Color, pairing the marching band teams with popular performers.  Here he adapts the concept of percussionists as dancers, and vice versa.  All are attired like him, in identical gray suits with bare feet, and all in perpetual motion.  The whole is very exhilarating, even if the music is not especially familiar to me, though Byrne’s Aspy aspect rings a bell.

My estimation of Do the Right Thing (1989, MC-93) went way up on a recent re-viewing.  I’d always found the ending problematic, but in the wake of George Floyd and all the other names that have now come to light, the choke-hold murder of Radio Raheem and the subsequent riot seem all too prophetic.  And what a charge to see Giancarlo Esposito, the tightly-controlled, steely-eyed Gus Fring of BB/BCS, back when he was Buggin Out.  Not to mention a young John Turturro, and Spike himself as Mookie.  The portrait of the Brooklyn neighborhood, and the rising tensions of a hot summer day, are wonderfully evoked.  Say what you (or I) will, the man has been rolling good joints for a long time.

Now that it’s possible to watch Malcolm X (1992, MRQE-83) disentangled from Spike’s merchandising and self-promotion, one can appreciate his effort to create a magnum opus worthy of the historic figure, an Afro-American counterpoise to Gandhi, going for a similar sweep and impact.  Denzel Washington is the definitive screen Malcolm, through all the changes that Spike rings on his life history, from “Detroit Red” zoot suits and Boston crime spree, to Nation of Islam/Black Power stalwart, to his Mecca pilgrimage toward racial reconciliation and subsequent assassination.  A more focused approach, such as Ava DuVernay’s portrait of MLK in Selma, might have been more persuasive ultimately, but in this epic life-spanning effort Spike earns his self-indulgences, such as an early song and dance sequence to one-up Busby Berkeley.  The best effect of revisiting this film will be the impulse to re-read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or maybe the highly-praised new Les Payne biography, The Dead are Arising.