• Rating:
Spike Lee's latest celebrated film says little new. Technically and artistically, nothing is missing: actors, music, editing, cinematography. Everything flows well, although 135 minutes of redundancy on blacks and whites might be a bit much. A political film, exquisitely political, which in the final minutes drops any diaphragm and clearly states its message: today's America has not changed; it is still as racist as it was in the seventies.
When making a political film, one needs to have something oblique to insinuate, to add a corollary – of any kind – to the simple message a party representative might convey. My feeling is that Lee has somewhat crudely attached a story to tell to a political message, giving the impression that the narrative is always secondary to the constant, monolithic, political invective.
A story that doesn't add much to the Ku Klux Klan issue, not characterized by its conceptual depth. So it doesn't make much sense to dwell for over two hours on basic concepts like “blacks speak poorly” and so on. The script is rare in its redundancy. It's unnecessary: the much-maligned Tarantino illustrated the KKK much more effectively in a few minutes of Django. Being idiots, they should be treated as such. Instead, Lee insists, continues to ridicule them, confirming that his black obsession often touches very low levels.
Perhaps unconsciously, Lee mocks racists with cheap tricks. Ugly, fat, half-wits, with fat wives, no guts, unable to realize they're being deceived. Instead, blacks are stunning, incredibly intelligent, with marvelous curly hair and sensual lips. The filmmaker falls into manichaeism and continues undeterred to the end, removing interest from stories already insignificant and “already seen”. And finally, archival footage of recent racist violence in America appears and everything changes. The political message is understandable, but the ficta story supporting it is wholly inadequate, even if based on real events.
More interesting are the side issues. The parallels between blacks and whites, for whom cops are always “pigs”, for whom white power is answered with black power. Or the issue of how power and media ultimately always align with whites; the police did a good job with the KKK, but suddenly there are no funds, so dismantling ensues. And the idea that, deep down, the average cop always believes the white person first before the black person. Or again, the frontal attack on one of the seminal films in cinema history, Griffith's Birth of a Nation.
The irony, much appreciated by critics, works but only to a certain extent. Ridiculing the stupidity of racists is sensible, but only if the device is limited to a few minutes. Prolonging the mockery throughout an entire film trivializes it, making it almost a childish game. The stifled laughter of the protagonist and his colleagues, while they talk on the phone with Duke, the head of the KKK, turns into a boomerang in the long run. Everything is reduced to a mere prank, and along with the final triumph of detective Ron Stallworth, it gives a strong sense of a film rooting for the protagonist rather than analyzing or simply accusing rather than understanding the reason for such hate.
Racism itself needs to be studied, and one needs to put oneself in the shoes of those who hate, not just ridicule them. Lee is too one-sided, unable to approach those angry whites, let alone dream of putting himself in their perspective. Again, Tarantino, in Inglourious Basterds, gave an incredibly sharp reading of Nazi racism: “When you have rodents in your house, it's normal to pick up a broom to drive them out”. Here instead cinema does not dirty its hands with the dark side of man, but like a political pamphlet, it only tells what is right and wrong. But we didn't need to go to the movies to know how ugly racism was – and is.
6/10
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