Spike Lee (2018)
The prologue to Spike Lee’s film starts with a clip from a famous scene in Gone with the Wind – the overhead shot of dead and wounded soldiers in the Atlanta railyard, Scarlett O’Hara moving among them, the Confederate flag flying above, an elegiac version of ‘Dixie’ on the soundtrack. Next comes a vehement, gaffe-strewn address to camera by Dr Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), a fictional white supremacist, with scenes from D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation playing in the background. Brief opening titles for BlacKkKlansman follow, with the legend: ‘Dis joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t’. Lee then tells the stranger-than-fiction true story of how, in the late 1970s, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a young black police officer in Colorado Springs, infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and spoke ‘white’ enough on the phone to fool David Duke (Topher Grace), Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK.
The film concludes with news footage from the ‘Unite the Right’ Charlottesville rally in August 2017; Trump’s assertion that the white nationalists there included ‘some very fine people’; and a clip of the real, sixtysomething David Duke, expressing hope that the rally is a step towards the restoration of the proper racial order of America. Lee finally dedicates his movie to Heather Heyer, the young white counter-protester who died at the Charlottesville rally, with the words ‘Rest in Power’. The Charlottesville film includes a shot of the car that killed Heyer careering into the crowd – an aerial shot that rhymes with the Gone with the Wind one. This insert is presumably actual drone footage of the event rather than an image designed by Lee. Even so, he has concocted a rich mix of reality and invention – not everything is fo’ real. It sometimes feels as if nearly every American film that appears nowadays is described as an insight into the power of fake news, a critique of the racism and paranoia that helped bring about, and help sustain, the Trump presidency. BlacKkKlansman merits the description more than most.
The story starts with Stallworth, a recent college graduate, at interview for a job in the Colorado Springs Police Department. On appointment as the Department’s first-ever African-American officer, he’s consigned to the records office desk, where he’s stultified and treated with varying degrees of contempt by white colleagues. Stallworth tells the police chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) he’s desperate to do undercover work. He gets his chance when Bridges assigns him to infiltrate a rally to be addressed by the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (who has recently adopted his new name, Kwame Ture). In the light of this, Bridges moves Stallworth to the CSPD’s intelligence unit. He sees a newspaper advertisement for Ku Klux Klan membership and comes up with his idea. His sergeant (Ken Garito) is supportive and Stallworth makes a call to local chapter president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold). The subsequent infiltration process involves Stallworth speaking on the phone to local Klan members (and Duke, in the first instance to expedite his KKK membership application). A fellow detective, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), posing as Ron Stallworth, meets the Klansmen face to face.
From Kennebrew Beauregard’s spiel onwards, Spike Lee stresses the prominence of anti-semitism and ‘Jewish conspiracies’ in KKK dogma: the partnership of an African-American and a Jew in this undercover work is, in dramatic terms, entirely apt. (It’s also, according to at least one adverse criticism of the film, a fiction.) At the outset, neither man is racially politicised, though Stallworth is necessarily aware of his ethnicity and puzzled why his partner doesn’t ‘have skin in the game’. Zimmerman explains his family weren’t practising Jews; he wasn’t bar-mitzvahed. He starts to see things differently once Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Pääkkönen), the most rabid member of the local chapter, subjects him at gunpoint to a ‘Jewish lie-detector’ test. In their car parked nearby, Stallworth listens in on Zimmerman’s wire and aborts the test by throwing a stone through Kendrickson’s window.
In spite of its alarming subject matter, BlacKkKlansman is highly entertaining – an exciting crime thriller as well as a potent black-comedy polemic. The screenplay, adapted from Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Lee, has fluent, incisive dialogue and is well structured, with some neat rhymes. The starting point is a visit to Colorado Springs by a leading light of Black Power. The climax takes place during an appearance in Colorado Springs by a notorious Klansman: Duke is present for the formal induction into the KKK of Stallworth in the form of Zimmerman. Stallworth’s first important assignment involves pretending not to be a cop, among the black Colorado College students who invited Kwame Ture to speak; at the business end of the film, he’s given the job of providing police security for Duke on his visit. Zimmerman twice manages to avoid having his cover blown through split-second interventions. The first is intentional (Stallworth’s stone through the window), the second accidental. A man called Walker (Nicholas Turturro), attending the KKK reception for Duke, recognises Zimmerman as the officer who once got him put in jail. Walker tells Kendrickson. The latter, on the point of putting Duke in the picture, is called urgently to the phone.
The caller is Kendrickson’s wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), whose job it is to place a bomb, made by Walker, at a civil rights rally taking place to mark Duke’s appearance in Colorado Springs. Stallworth, noting Connie’s odd behaviour and swift exit from the induction event, alerts the police at the rally venue. Their response panics Connie, who phones to ask her husband what to do next. He tells her to implement ‘plan B’, targeting instead the home of the black student union leader Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier). Patrice and Connie are the only two significant female characters and it’s disappointing that the former is the one important role that’s underwritten. Patrice and Stallworth take an immediate liking to each other when he shows up at the Kwame Ture event; they continue to see each other and it’s some time before he owns up to being a cop – the admission scene is a rare perfunctory, underpowered moment in BlacKkKlansman. Connie’s first appearance is relatively weak too. Serving sandwiches to the Klansmen at a chapter meeting, she’s humiliated by Felix’s dismissal of her. In the presence of the others, she tells him he’ll need her help one day. (As tends to happen when someone in a movie says that, she’s vindicated.) Yet outsize Ashlie Atkinson, thanks to fearless engagement with her character, later provides one of the alarming highlights of the film. Snuggled up in bed with Felix, the weirdly childlike Connie chatters about what they’re going to do to black people. All our dreams, she murmurs in sleepy ecstasy, are going to come true.
You don’t expect political subtlety from Spike Lee and you seldom get it here but he and his co-writers illustrate differences of degree in the racism at work in the police force – between, for example, Chief Bridges and the corrupt, abusive CPSD officer Landers (Frederick Weller) – and even in the ardent bigotry of the Klansmen. There’s a distance between the canny, controlled Walter Breachway and the sweaty, bug-eyed Felix, with the vilely droll fatso Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser) somewhere in between. I’m usually dubious about presenting the baddies in a political polemic as ridiculous but there really is no option here, and mocking them doesn’t dilute their viciousness. Trump’s brief appearance alone is compelling confirmation there’s such a thing as an appallingly powerful nitwit. Connecting malignity and idiocy also helps Lee deliver an effective comedy-of-errors climax. Connie can’t fit the explosive device into Patrice’s mailbox and puts it under her car instead. Felix, Ivanhoe and Walker arrive on the scene, park beside Patrice’s car and, when the bomb detonates, are killed in the explosion.
The Gone with the Wind clip introduces race and the representation of African Americans in film history as a persistent and supple theme of BlacKkKlansman. It’s there, most obviously, in the reprise of Birth of a Nation, which is screened at Ron Stallworth’s KKK induction. (The enthusiastic reception of the audience is a bit overdone.) It’s there in David Duke’s creepy moment of nostalgia for a Mammy figure from his own childhood, in Ron’s conversation with Patrice about the blaxpoitation films of the early 1970s (Spike Lee’s teenage years) and their heroes – Richard Roundtree’s Shaft vs Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in Super Fly. It’s there too in some of the casting. While the KKK are inducting Stallworth, an elderly African-American activist is recalling, in an address to Patrice and her fellow students, a white lynch mob’s torture and killing of a friend and contemporary back in 1916: the activist is played by ninety-one-year-old Harry Belafonte, whose social activism has outlasted his movie stardom. The protagonist is played by a man whose father’s screen career, including the lead in several Spike Lee Joints – Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, Inside Man – has endured like no other African-American actor’s to date.
You occasionally hear Denzel Washington in the voice of his son, who gives a strong performance. One of his finest moments comes early on, when Ron Stallworth is at the Kwame Ture rally and, as he records the event, accomplishing a double concealment. Stallworth not only has to hide his true identity from the people immediately surrounding him. In his vocal reactions to the speech, which will be heard on the recording he’s making for CSPD, he must also control his emotional reactions to Ture’s rallying cry. Washington is well supported by the dependably acute Adam Driver as Zimmerman and by Topher Grace. Grace does well to play David Duke straight; as a result, he is sinister and comical, the qualities Lee is looking to balance more generally. With some help from a 1970s hairdo and clothes, Grace makes Duke, as well as intellectually vain, a bit grotty and shopsoiled, even though he’s only in his late twenties. (Topher Grace is forty: maybe that helped too.)
Winding up the tension as he cross-cuts between the KKK gathering and the civil rights demonstrators, between chants of White Power and Black Power, Spike Lee has lost little of the dynamism he showed in Do the Right Thing nearly thirty years ago. (Terence Blanchard’s score and Barry Alexander Brown’s editing give him considerable assistance.) In view of his back catalogue, it’s striking that one objection that’s been made to the largely well-received BlacKkKlansman is that Lee is too kind to the police – particularly in a late sequence that shows Ron Stallworth and his colleagues celebrating the success of their project as one happy multi-racial team. Stallworth’s appointment as Duke’s bodyguard for the day is probably an instance of Lee’s sacrificing credibility for comic effect; if taken literally, though, it suggests the CSPD was able and willing to rise above its own collective racism in order to demonstrate contempt for the Ku Klux Klan. That also sounds like wishful thinking but Lee certainly isn’t soft-pedalling in the extended finale that culminates in the Charlottesville footage. He pushed his politically angry message too hard in Do the Right Thing. What’s finally shocking about BlacKkKlansman is that you don’t feel its force is the result of distortion or exaggeration. In the current political climate of America, Spike Lee, at sixty-one, looks like a director whose time has come as never before.
30 August 2018
