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Posted by on Jul 17, 2013 in Movies, Ted McLoof | 0 comments

Spike Lee’s Most Overlooked Joint

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How come no one gives respect to Spike Lee?

Last week, the trailer for his remake of Oldboy premiered, to a reaction I found frankly surprising. Or, maybe not surprising, per se, since there’s a sort-of double-fanboy-split going on here: both Lee and (at least the 2003) Oldboy have loyal, cult fanbases, though Lee’s, I think, bleeds out into actual critics and film scholars. It’s Lee’s respect among critics that took me aback when I read reactions to the trailer. There was a resounding, collective disappointment, like, “Why is a shitty director like Spike Lee blaspheming such a masterpiece?”

Maybe the explanation for that sentiment is that it comes from the internet, and most people who leave comments on the internet are the target audience for a film like Oldboy. Oldboy falls into a category of film I call Frat for Thought—films that have one, very basic, only-profound-if-you’ve-never-thought-before idea, and usually a plot that exists solely to point toward a shock ending. I call them Frat for Thought because they’re the kind of films fratty dudes’ minds are blown by because their minds aren’t usually the things being blown. They’re the kind of films you can easily picture a couple of stoned bro-ish guys deconstructing in depth at two in the morning, not because the films themselves are profound or human or influenced by any cinematic predecessor but because they have two dimensions rather than the usual one. The kind of film that looks smart only because it’s wedged in a collection between Taladega Nights and Van Wilder. Such films include Donnie Darko, Boondock Saints, Inception, and Pi. Oldboy is prime Frat for Though territory—but Spike Lee isn’t. That’s partly because he’s black (and there’s absolutely a racism inherent in suggesting Lee would “ruin” a “masterpiece” like Oldboy—give me some leeway here, I kept my mouth shut about Zimmerman this week): rarely do directors or actors of color penetrate the world of Frat for Thought. But more precisely, Lee’s oeuvre is elevated above these dumbed-down films because they’re smart, rich, and actually thought-provoking.

They’re not always well-directed, though, and that’s been Lee’s misfortune in his latter-day career. That sounds like a pretty huge blind spot—that a director’s Achilles’ heel is directing—but Lee has so much else to offer that that’s easy to overlook sometimes. He’s a fantastic writer, for one. Malcolm X is, for my money, the best biopic ever made, mainly because it manages to get the entire thrust and arc of Malcolm X’s life into a manageable block of screen time, and is patient and levelheaded in its portrayal of such a controversial figure. He’s also an extremely convincing activist, as in When the Levees Broke, his documentary about post-Katrina New Orleans, wherein he argues that the government was not only incompetent but willfully ignorant of the plight of Katrina’s black victims. And of course when he does direct something properly, he directs the hell out of it, as in Do the Right Thing, not only his best but one of the best American films of all time, a tour-de-force of jazz and comedy and musical dialogue that somehow also manages to be a seamless portrait of race relations in contemporary America.

But people don’t want a civics lesson when they watch their films, and Lee is an outspoken political voice. Frightened suburban white people think he’s militant—often without having seen any of his films—which is probably why they didn’t come out in droves, as they should have, in 2002, to see a gem of a film called 25th Hour. I wonder how they’d have reacted if they had.

25th Hour, like Do the Right Thing, takes place over one twenty-four hour period in a New York neighborhood. Our hero, Montgomery Brogan (Edward Norton), got busted for drug-dealing and has been sentenced to eight years in a maximum security prison. This is his last day of freedom, and Lee’s camera follows him around as he ties up whatever loose ends he can before he has to leave in the morning. There’s not really much of a plot, beyond a vague, subconscious, paranoid suspicion about who ratted on him. That suspicion keeps us interested (especially with the aid of a few flashbacks that keep us on our toes, guessing)—but really it’s just a character study, a two-hour look into the mind of a man who’s about to lose everything, and what that mentality entails.

What’s smartest about 25th Hour is how it plays around, like a cat and a ball of string, with its themes. Redemption is one—how is Monty going to redeem himself in the eyes of his loved ones before the clock runs out? He tries everything, from ensuring his dad is safe from his former boss, to apologizing (eventually) to his girlfriend, to letting his friend Francis (Barry Pepper) beat him up. His father (Brian Cox) is also trying to redeem himself, as a recovering alcoholic who thinks he’s failed his son. Moral ambiguity runs throughout the film, and that’s another theme. Monty broke the law, sure, but we see over and over again how easy it is to break the law based on context. Francis is a Wall Street trader who, you could argue, breaks the law for a living. Monty’s friend Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) toys with the idea of an affair with an underage student. Monty, quite simply, is the one who got caught.

And the nature of his getting caught—the flashback to his interrogation—demonstrates a new kind of Spike Lee, the Spike Lee who then went on to make more Inside Man’s than Girl 6’s. Monty’s going away for as long as he is because of the Rockefeller laws, which require a zero-tolerance approach to first-time drug smugglers. The law is in effect racist, put into place as a strict way to deal with petty urban crime and put as many black men in jail as possible. But Lee backs off on this point, allows us to understand and consider that for ourselves, and even switches the roles so that the cops are black and Monty himself is white—which really demonstrates Lee’s overlooked talent for ambiguity over finger-pointing, not seen done this well since Mookie and Sal confronted each other outside of the Sal’s Famous.

Lee’s direction here is arguably his second-best. Maybe it’s that he pushed the message-thing as far as he could with Bamboozled, which came just before it. Or, more likely, it’s the events of 9/11 that shook this native New Yorker into making such nuanced cinema again. Certainly the specter of 9/11 hangs over the whole thing, with shots of Ground Zero being cleaned up, and quick clips of “These Colors Don’t Run” flags during montages that have nothing to do with 9/11. The montage in which Monty tells the entire city to fuck itself, each ethnic group one by one, is ripped directly from Do the Right Thing’s racial slur montage, but with the added kicker at the end when Monty turns his accusations on himself—which might deliberately demonstrate that when we’ve got nothing left, our petty grievances with the world melt away. And some of his direction is simply downright funny, as in a shot of PSH’s horrified face through student Anna Paquin’s akimbo arm as her hip sways back and forth in low-rider jeans.

The film is not without its flaws. There’s a gay-panic streak a mile wide, for instance: the fear of being put away for eight years, for these characters, has everything and only to do with being fucked in the ass (in reality, I’d imagine, losing eight years of your life and coming out a shell of your former self is probably what’s really sad). That’s why I pin the Francis-beating-Monty up scene on Monty wanting redemption, allowing his friend to knock some sense into him, rather than his “make me ugly” so I won’t get raped justification, which is just silly.

And anyway, whatever flaws the film has are worth it for the last ten minutes. And not in a Frat for Thought gotcha! kind of ending, either. The film’s conclusion doesn’t pull the rug out from under you (as does, for instance, Oldboy, which isn’t worth watching twice once you know the Big Reveal)—it doesn’t try to trick you for having gotten invested. Instead, it delivers a real payoff, a monologue delivered by Brian Cox that kicks the ass of any recent monologue in film (possibly second only to…well, Brian Cox, also in 2002, in Adaptation. Brian Cox is awesome). I won’t give it away, but the film closes the way it opened, with an act of salvation grown from love. The whodunit drug mystery is the Trojan horse here, sneaking a smart and touching Spike Lee Joint in the guise of a Frat for Thought whoa-fest. How come no one gives respect to Spike Lee?

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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