Old Yorker

  • Malcolm X

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (1992)

    The process of bringing the life of Malcolm X to the screen lasted a quarter of a century[1].  In 1967, two years after Malcolm’s death, the producer Marvin Worth obtained the rights to his autobiography (‘as told to Alex Haley’).  The first screenplay, by James Baldwin, dates back to 1968; Spike Lee shares the eventual screenplay credit with Arnold Perl, who died in 1971 (the year in which Worth made an Oscar-nominated documentary feature about Malcolm).  Lee took over as director from Norman Jewison – after a public outcry, to which Lee himself contributed, that the biography of such a major figure in black American political history wasn’t being made by an African-American.  The picture doesn’t have either the epic scale or the psychological depth that a running time of 202 minutes might lead you to hope.   The first half is a mixture of lethargic and restless and the ending is misjudged but there are some fine things in between.  In spite of the tortuous history of the project, Malcolm X – in its good parts – is a convincingly personal film.  It also seems a more honest one than Do the Right Thing.   

    The first part of the picture is uncertain in tone and tempo.  It’s centred on the young Malcolm Little’s criminal career with his friend Shorty, working for a Harlem gangster then as burglars in Boston in the 1940s.  There are grimly powerful flashbacks to the harassment of Malcolm’s family and the eventual murder of his preacher father by the Ku Klux Klan; a sequence in a Harlem dance hall is elating thanks to the extension of some of the dancers.  For the most part, though, Malcolm’s voiceover dominates to the extent of draining imagination from the film-making.  What we see on screen often seems little more than a faithful visualisation of what’s being described in the vocal narrative.  (All the way through, the crowd and street scenes tend to be stiff, lacking the texture of real life.)  When Malcolm is sent to prison (with Shorty sent to a different one), the storytelling tends to be conventionally melodramatic – as in an episode like his being placed in solitary confinement for refusing to speak his prison number.   Malcolm’s conversion to Islam, under the tutelage of a fellow prisoner called Baines, is crudely written and obviously staged.  Yet it’s at this point that Malcolm X appears to undergo a conversion of its own.

    This is especially true of Denzel Washington in the title role.  In the early scenes in Harlem, he betrays the natural awkwardness of an actor in his late thirties playing someone little more than half his actual age.  When Malcolm sleeps for the first time with a white woman, Washington is a magnetic mixture of pride and uncertainty as he lies in bed next morning, asking the girl to kiss his feet and feed him his breakfast.   But he’s unsatisfying in important ways in some of what follows.  Malcolm, in order to gain the psychological upper hand on a cocky young mixed-race gangster, starts a game of Russian roulette.  Washington’s imperturbability here isn’t expressive:  he doesn’t suggest either an inherent streak of craziness or an unnatural, chilling calm.  But, once Malcolm comes out of jail a changed man, Washington is a changed actor too.  In prison, Malcolm has read and absorbed Islamic scripture and the black supremacist-inflected teaching of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam.  He thus discovers his capacity for thought and for political action.  When Malcolm finds his public voice, Washington begins to realise the sense of superiority that his presence has implied from the start – especially when he smiles, and seems to threaten (thanks to a great set of teeth) to snarl at the same time.  Washington does a brilliant job of delivering Malcolm’s oratory.  He develops an almost exultant rhythm, imparting Malcolm’s sense of enjoying the sound of his own voice and his fluency.  As an actor, Denzel Washington is not a natural rabble-rouser but he makes a virtue of this in the way he reads Malcolm’s platform speeches.  Because he has evidently thought through his lines, he manages to persuade you that what Malcolm says is thoughtfully considered.  Washington convinces you of Malcolm X’s belief in the words he’s speaking, as well as his self-belief as a platform performer.

    At one point, Malcolm watches television news reports from (I guess) Montgomery, Alabama.  There are shots of police dealing violently with black protesters and the face of Martin Luther King appears on the screen.  Spike Lee seems to get so absorbed in this footage that he almost forgets that it’s Malcolm watching – and so do we in the audience.  Every time Lee shows white racial prejudice and violence in action here, his anger is infectious.  He implied at the end of Do the Right Thing that he was split between King’s and Malcolm X’s points of view but there seemed no doubt where his emotional allegiance lay and Malcolm X confirms this.  The only time we hear King’s voice here is in his reaction, talking to the press, to Malcolm’s death.  King is cool, lofty, moralising.  He describes the assassination as ‘an unfortunate tragedy’.  His sound bites, as they would now be called, sound inappropriately polished in the circumstances – ‘His death shows there are people in this society who cannot disagree without being violent … who express themselves by being violently disagreeable’.  Lee seems almost to be using King’s epigrammatic assurance against him – as if to say, ‘Look what the violently disagreeable did to you a few years later’.

    Lee does seem to have more genuinely divided feelings about the person of Malcolm X:  he’s drawn to Malcolm’s black nationalism but appears to have no time for the Muslim stuff.  Casting himself in the role of Shorty, who expresses his bafflement with his old friend’s new-found religion, feels like a candid (and winning) admission of Lee’s own feelings about this aspect of Malcolm.  (When he receives a letter in prison describing the conversion, Shorty merely says, ‘He’s gone nuts’.  He attends one of Malcolm’s rallies after both men have been released and admires the performance without appreciating the content.)    Lee’s heart and imagination simply aren’t in a passage like Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca.  This travelogue has a generic feel – biopic standard issue – even though Denzel Washington invests the sequences, and speaks Malcolm’s prayers (I assume in Arabic), with rare sympathetic intelligence.

    In spite of Washington’s skill and Lee’s engagement with the material, Malcolm X is never fully satisfying as the dramatisation – as distinct from the dramatic reconstruction – of a life.  Lee mixes real TV footage with expertly simulated archive material.  I got more out of watching this and Washington’s delivery of the speeches than I probably would have got if Lee had done more to try to show the private side of Malcolm X – but it’s hard to deny that the film doesn’t go very deep.   That’s why the connection between Washington and Angela Bassett in their early scenes counts for so much here.  As Betty Shabazz, a nurse and devout follower of Elijah Muhammad, Bassett has a beautiful emotional strength during Malcolm’s courtship of her and the early days of their marriage.  It’s probably the fault more of the screenplay than the actress that her performance pays diminishing dividends as the tensions between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam leaders from whom he breaks, and the resulting threats on his life, increase.  Even so, the long scene in which Malcolm and Betty have their first ever row – in which she complains he’s being exploited by the Nation of Islam inner circle and reads out newspaper reports about paternity suits being brought against Elijah Muhammad – is wonderfully sustained by Bassett and Washington, and very well directed.

    Spike Lee’s ambivalence about Malcolm is eloquent and likeable so the splurge of hagiography which concludes Malcolm X is a big disappointment.  Perhaps you can see it coming in the events leading up to Malcolm’s assassination – in front of an audience including his wife and children – at a rally in the Audubon Ballroom in New York.  Malcolm’s awareness of the inevitability of his fate seems almost Christ-like (Washington does an honourable job of playing this).  After Malcolm’s death, Lee shifts abruptly into an awkward concoction of true and false.  Over a montage of black power highlights of the years following Malcolm’s death, the voice of Ossie Davis reads a eulogy.  According to Wikipedia, Davis is rereading the words he actually spoke at Malcolm’s funeral but this doesn’t prevent the rhetoric sounding actorish and windy.  Then Nelson Mandela appears – sort of as himself but in the person of a Soweto schoolteacher – and the effect is similarly fake.  Lee’s decision to incorporate footage of the actual Malcolm X here is counterproductive too:  Malcolm’s appearance leaves you in no doubt either of his uncompromising charisma or of how different he is from Denzel Washington.  It’s not just a matter of the naturally aggressive set of Malcolm’s features.  His essentially confrontational charm makes you feel that Washington’s portrait of the man was painstaking but lacking in the visceral excitement of the genuine article.  The coda virtually obliterates much of what’s gone before and overshadows Washington’s fine performance.  You come out wondering if Lee didn’t just want to make a documentary.

    The cast also includes Albert Hall as Baines; Al Freeman Jr, some way over the top as Elijah Muhammad (both in his sinister mandarin act and especially in the scene in which he censures Malcolm for the latter’s public remarks about the assassination of John Kennedy); and Delroy Lindo, impressive as the Harlem mobster West Indian Archie. Malcolm’s parents are played by Tommy Hollis and Lonette McKee. Peter Boyle and Christopher Plummer both register in cameos – as a police captain and a smilingly poisonous prison chaplain respectively.  As usual with a Spike Lee joint, the cinematography is by Ernest Dickerson and is vivid.  This was the second Lee film for which Terence Blanchard (rather than Lee’s father Bill) wrote the score.  It serves its purpose but is long on story-of-a-legend portentousness, short on individuality.

    25 September 2009

    [1] see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X_(film)

     

  • Do the Right Thing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (1989)

    A famous film and a missed opportunity.  Spike Lee sets the action during a Brooklyn heatwave over a period of twenty-four hours.  He dramatises the racial tensions of the place and the brewing violence inherent in it.   In the first half of Do the Right Thing, the irritating effect of the weather on the characters’ mood is palpably convincing.  If the eventual explosion occurred as a result of frazzled nerves – but was at the same time an expression of hostilities that went deeper than heat-induced mood – Lee might have achieved more than a memorably dynamic and confrontational succès de scandale.   As the film goes on, the people in it use political language that is increasingly and often crudely explicit yet they get through the day without all hell being let loose.  When the mayhem eventually occurs, it’s after dark and the explosion doesn’t seem to be the consequence of an inexorable raising of the temperature.  The laying waste to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria – the nerve centre of the whole film – may be the necessary climax to Lee’s political intentions but at closing time, when things are cooling off, it isn’t either dramatically or atmospherically inevitable.  (By the very end of the film, the weather has become disappointingly metaphorical – with talk of chilling out etc.)

    Do the Right Thing often has the look and sound of a great film.   The vivid, deep-toned photography by Ernest Dickerson and the emotionally supple score by Lee’s father Bill don’t just consistently serve the story.  They’re also attuned to and suggestive of the meteorology and the agitation in the air.   The film is politically of the moment:  the graffiti we see include references to notorious recent examples of crimes which had seen blacks on the receiving end of violence and injustice.  But the writing is sometimes desperately clumsy.  We can see that the restaurant owner Sal’s elder son Pino is instinctively and strongly racist and that he’s pretty thick.  It’s implausible when Pino – in an exchange with Mookie, the black dogsbody in the pizzeria – blares on about what he’s inferred from listening to Al Sharpton Jr, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.  Pino is too determined a bigot even to spend time hearing other points of view.  As Lee has written it, the character of Sal isn’t much more than a series of socio-political statements.  He can live with the multi-ethnic neighbourhood but draws the line at accommodating his now mainly black clientele by substituting photographs of black heroes to replace those of Italian icons (De Niro, Pacino, Sinatra, a pope) on the walls of the pizzeria.  When the place goes up in flames, Sal delivers a tired that-place-was-my-life-I-built-it-up-with-my-bare-hands lament.  Lee is fortunate that Danny Aiello’s fine performance creates a richer individual than the script supplies. (John Turturro, as might be expected, rather overdoes Pino’s raw viciousness.  Richard Edson is better as Sal’s other, less hostile son, Vito.)

    Ossie Davis as a lovable philosopher-drunk and Ruby Dee as a sweetly stern matron seem to embody black cinema stereotypes that Lee regards as obsolete – but is it intentional that their style of acting seems a thing of the past too? Plenty of others in the large cast aren’t embarrassing in this way but still seem to be doing a turn, for all that the turn is individual and vivid.   I think this applies to Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison and Robin Harris (the choric streetside commentators on the neighbourhood’s goings on), to Giancarlo Esposito (the pizzeria customer leading the campaign for black pin-ups on Sal’s wall), and to Rosie Perez (in her undeniably striking screen debut as Mookie’s Hispanic girlfriend).  There’s more depth in the performances of Lee himself (as Mookie), his sister Joie (as Mookie’s sister) and Bill Nunn (as Radio Raheem – whose ghetto-blaster plays ‘Fight the Power’ throughout and whose death sparks the eventual conflagration).  The stand-out performance in the African-American cast is from Sam Jackson (the future Samuel L Jackson) as Senor Love Daddy, a local radio DJ who provides weather updates in more ways than one.  Jackson gives his spiels a rhythm that’s both funny and dangerous.  (Senor Love Daddy’s dazzlingly unending roll call of great black singers is one of the highlights of the film.)

    Radio Raheen wears a four-fingered ring on each hand – ‘HATE’ on the left, ‘LOVE’ on the right (a clear nod to the words written on the knuckles of Robert Mitchum’s false preacher in The Night of the Hunter, whose homiletic party piece is acting out a battle between his two hands).  A number of times in the course of Do the Right Thing we see a photograph of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X shaking hands – the photo is shown to camera by a disabled man who wanders round the neighbourhood (Roger Guenveur Smith).  At the end of the film, Lee puts on the screen quotes by both men:  King foreswears violence as a means of advancing black civil rights; Malcolm sees violence as justified if it’s a considered act of self-defence.  If Lee means to suggest that he’s personally split down the middle between the two views – determined to do the right thing but ambivalent as to what that is – this represents a striking departure from the point of view that seems to propel the film:  at no stage does Lee seem drawn to King’s idea of right.  Sal’s restaurant is destroyed when, after Radio Raheen has died at the hands of the police, Mookie throws a trash can through the plate glass window with a yell of ‘Hate!’  The mob that has gathered in the street bursts into the pizzeria and starts a fire.  The act of destruction can hardly be seen as one of self-defence, so it doesn’t seem to be justified by Malcolm X’s philosophy either.  Lee looks to be using both King and Malcolm fraudulently in an effort to convince us (and perhaps himself) that Do the Right Thing is more thoughtful than it actually is.

    At the start of proceedings in a nearly full NFT1, the BFI’s head of events (a man with plenty to answer for) announced a ‘very special guest’ to introduce the film.  It was Spike Lee who, to great applause, gave an introduction that was exemplary in its brevity – a couple of sentences.  There was much clapping at the end of the film too – perhaps increased by the knowledge that Lee was in the building – but it made me wonder what was being acclaimed.  Was it the film-making or the film-maker’s point of view?  I suppose it was a mixture of the two – and that that’s preferable to applauding a piece solely for its virtuosity and regardless of its political viewpoint.  (You wouldn’t hear a BFI audience putting their hands together for a Leni Riefenstahl film and you wouldn’t want to.)  But do people really mean to endorse a picture which appears to sanction racially-driven violence?  (The trashing of the pizzeria is cathartic.)  The irony – one that Spike Lee should deplore – is that I’m sure some of that applause was condescending.  It was the sound of a predominantly white audience accepting what it wouldn’t have tolerated from a white director, and feeling that to clap was the right – the politically correct – thing to do.

    21 September 2009

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