Spike Lee (2020)
Da 5 Bloods started life as ‘The Last Tour’, a script (by Danny Bilson and Paul de Meo) about white Vietnam veterans returning to the former war zone decades later. When Oliver Stone, who was set to direct, left the project, Spike Lee and Kevin Willmott took the script over, and the vets became African Americans. ‘The Last Tour’ doesn’t sound like the most original movie idea (or name). Da 5 Bloods looks set to be a different matter. Not many films have focused on the experience of black US soldiers in the Vietnam War, and its aftershocks. A Spike Lee Joint almost invariably means political business. The title is stark and challenging.
Four of the ‘bloods’, now in their sixties, meet up in Ho Chi Minh City. Their mission is to find, and bring back to America, the remains of their inspirational squad leader, ‘Stormin’ Norman’, who was killed in action in Vietnam. The foursome have an ulterior motive. They’re looking for something else left behind all those years ago – a cache of gold bars, stolen from a CIA plane that crashed in the jungle, in the same area where Norm, the fifth blood, died. The squad buried the gold for subsequent retrieval. They were thwarted by a napalm strike on the area that removed its landmarks. Lee’s previous (and still best) film, BlacKkKlansman (2018), included references, more and less explicit, to the treatment of racially charged themes, and the representation of African Americans, in cinema history. At first, Da 5 Bloods is more ambitious. It uses the Vietnam War as a paradigm of white America’s exploitation of black America, while recognising the conflict as a sub-genre of American cinema, as well as a matter of history and an enduring trauma.
Soon after arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, the former comrades – Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and Eddie (Norm Lewis) – visit an Apocalypse Now-themed night club. Over drinks, they deride Rambo movies, the overworked plotline of soldiers returning to Vietnam to rescue POW colleagues, Hollywood’s fixation on ‘trying to go back and win the war’. When he describes in flashback sequences what happened to his characters half a century ago, Spike Lee shrinks the widescreen image to a square. The effect creates the impression of a ‘theatre of war’ in a double sense: it makes the viewer more conscious of watching dramatised warfare. In short, Da 5 Bloods is highly aware of its generic ancestry. Spike Lee, as a cineaste and politically driven filmmaker, is highly qualified to pursue the dual game plan suggested above.
He sets out his stall clearly on the political history as well as the movie history front, opening with a montage of news-film clips from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Muhammad Ali explains his refusal to serve in Vietnam. Apollo 11 lands on ‘da Moon’. Tommy Smith and John Carlos give the Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics. There’s archive of Bobby Seale (‘Here we go with the damned Vietnam War, and we still ain’t getting nothing but racist police brutality’); of Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael (‘America has declared war on black people’); of the Kent State University shootings. Lee soon injects racial iniquity into the dramatised sequences too. The (real) North Vietnamese radio broadcaster Hanoi Hannah (played by Veronica Ngo) informs her African-American listeners of Martin Luther King’s assassination; reminds them that around a third of US combat forces in Vietnam are black compared with just over 10% of the American population as a whole. The CIA plane’s cargo was intended as a US government reward to the indigenous Lahu people, for their help in fighting the Viet Cong. It’s when Norm (Chadwick Boseman) reminds his four comrades of the perennial injustices suffered by African Americans at government hands that the bloods decide to keep the gold for themselves.
The first part of Da 5 Bloods is strong in both the present-day and the circa 1970 scenes. In Ho Chi Minh City, their Vietnamese guide, Vinh (Johnny Trí Nguyễn), introduces the men to what’s become a major tourist destination. (Vietnam is vividly coloured by the cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel – in the neon-lit urban scenes and the later rural and jungle settings, with their almost luminous greens and oranges.) In the night club, Otis gives twenty dollars to a persistent beggar – a disabled adolescent boy. As the men leave the club, the boy enjoys playing a trick, setting off firecrackers that send the Americans, thinking it’s gunfire, diving for cover. That’s a cue for one of the flashbacks to war, in which Lee has the four older actors play their younger selves. This is practically helpful to the viewer (no need to spend time working out who used to be who) and powerfully expressive. It suggests that what we’re seeing are the memories of men who’ve irreversibly aged in the meantime – memories in which Norm is inevitably preserved as forever young and heroic. Back in the present, Lee underlines the vets’ conversation with occasional inserts like a still photograph of the black soldier Milton Olive III, who sacrificed his life to save others and became ‘the first brother to be awarded the Medal of Honor in ’Nam’. These stylistic devices, compelling in themselves, combine to give Lee scope for developing the narrative in realistic and more Brechtian modes.
He also begins supplying backstory on two of the old soldiers and, in doing so, brings in other characters who play important parts in what follows. Otis visits the apartment of an old flame, Tiên (Lê Y Lan), where he meets her beautiful, mixed-race daughter, Michon (Sandy Hương Phạm), and learns from Tiên that he fathered her. Through Tiên, Otis and the others are introduced to Desroche (Jean Reno), an unscrupulous French businessman who strikes a hard bargain to help the bloods, if they strike gold, to smuggle it out of Vietnam. The appearance of Paul’s son, David (Jonathan Majors), quickly conveys strains between him and his father. It also raises a shade of ambiguity as to the identity of the fifth blood. David, who’ll accompany the older men on their double search, is Paul’s blood and there’s clearly bad blood between them.
On their way out to the jungle, the party stops at a hotel. In a bar there, David meets Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), the French founder of LAMB (Love Against Mines and Bombs), an international outfit dedicated to clearing landmines. The French characters are important in Da 5 Bloods as reminders of the colonialist presence in Vietnam prior to ‘the American war’, as Vinh and other locals call it (strikingly, to Western ears). The immediate approach to the jungle, by river boat, is accompanied on the soundtrack by ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, another unmistakable Apocalypse Now reference, even with no helicopters in sight. Vinh bids farewell to the group, arranging to pick them up in a couple of days’ time. He also questions the wisdom of venturing into wilderness without a local guide at their side – the kind of ominous remark that, in movies, seldom goes unvindicated. This one proves to be no exception.
Once the subject of landmines is raised in David’s meeting with Hedy, you’re similarly primed to expect one or more of the bloods to step on one. It’s this, as much as whether they’ll find Norm or the gold (and they find both), that gives sustained tension to the search, in which Lee handles the suspense expertly until the last moments. When a mine eventually explodes, it’s less a shock than a surprise that you saw it coming. Eddie is angered by the group’s squabbling over division of the spoils. For the only time in the film, he gets a sizeable monologue – a declamatory, money-is-the-root-of-all-evil number. This goes on and on: there’s only one way Eddie’s going to be stopped. Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) was a slow burn to an explosively violent climax and the build to the landmine explosion is like a microcosm of its famous predecessor’s structure. Da 5 Bloods, though, is barely halfway through. This extended episode is both its core and its turning point. What follows is increasingly unsatisfying.
In the chaos that follows Eddie’s death, David also steps on a landmine but without triggering it. Hedy suddenly appears on the scene, with her colleagues Seppo (Jasper Pääkkönen) and Simon (Paul Walter Hauser, who creates a character with next to no material). With their help, Paul et al yank David clear – another gripping sequence. Paul has already given signs of incipient paranoia. The underworld-connected Tiên gave Otis a gun for the expedition, just in case it’s needed. On their first night out to the jungle, Paul finds and appropriates the weapon, suspicious as to why Otis has it. Once David has been pulled to safety, Paul now uses the gun to take the LAMB contingent hostage, fearful they’ll report the bloods to the authorities. He’s eventually disarmed by his son and other companions; Seppo, in the meantime, has escaped. The following day, when the party emerges from the jungle and meets Vinh at their agreed rendezvous spot, they’re confronted by a group of Vietnamese gunmen, whom Vinh assumes to be Desroche’s men. They’ve captured Seppo and demand the bloods’ booty in exchange for their hostage. In the shootout that follows, David is shot in the leg and Seppo killed by a landmine. The others survive but Paul, unwilling to trust any of his companions, takes off with his share of the gold. He returns alone to the jungle, where – to cut what feels like a long story short – he goes mad.
From the start, Paul stands out from his companions – thanks partly to Delroy Lindo and partly to the disproportionate attention given the character. Paul is a Trump supporter, complete with ‘Make America Great Again’ cap. He still suffers from ‘Nam-induced PTSD. The film continues to describe his difficult relationship with a close family member. In all three respects, he’s different from Eddie, Otis and Melvin, each of whom is underwritten. The ill-fated Eddie is introduced as a successful businessman then revealed to have gone bankrupt. He has a pigeon-toed walk. That’s about it. Otis is given, as well as an ex-lover and an unexpected daughter, a mild drugs habit but little more – except that Clarke Peters makes him distinctively quiet, even reflective. If it wasn’t for Isiah Whitlock Jr’s strong, believable presence, Melvin would barely register at all. Chadwick Boseman does remarkable work: charismatic and controlled, he makes Norm both credibly human and mythically noble but Norm’s time on screen is (properly) limited.
Paul’s domination becomes doubly problematic. Delroy Lindo’s magnetism often benefits Da 5 Bloods. The discovery of Norm’s remains is an anti-climax – or would be without the close-up of Lindo’s extraordinary face as Paul kneels to murmur a prayer. Lindo has had a lengthy successful career in film, TV and theatre but never a screen acting opportunity like this, which he seizes over-eagerly: his all-stops-out mania becomes too relentless. The bigger problem is that it’s hard to see Paul as representative of black experience, even though that’s how Lee has set up the film as a whole and this character specifically – an African American so disillusioned with the status quo that he even voted for Trump. But the root causes of Paul’s wrecked personality have little to do with ethnicity. It turns out he’s always resented his son because his wife died giving birth to David; and that Paul’s unending PTSD is the legacy of a particular, terrible incident, rather than of fighting an unjustified war on behalf of a country that variously abuses its black citizens. A flashback reveals that Norm died when Paul accidentally shot him during an ambush. Shortly before his own death, Paul has a vision of Norm, who says he forgives him. These explanations, melodramatic and far from original, could just as easily apply to a screwed-up white man yet Lee puts his dramatic money on Paul at the expense of his ex-comrades. The consequence is a dilution of Da 5 Bloods‘s political and polemical force.
After earning himself Leeway to combine realistic and non-realistic elements, the director also virtually abandons the latter or, at least, the intentionally unrealistic. In doing so, he exposes more clearly the limitations of the screenplay. The right-on-cue arrival of Hedy and her team in the jungle, for example, would be easier to accept if it didn’t interrupt a long naturalistic passage. The generous helpings of gory violence are extended and graphically realistic too. The shootout in which David is injured is only the hors d’oeuvre. Paul dies in a hail of gunfire from Desroche’s men. They and their boss then arrive at an abandoned temple, where Vinh has advised the others to take cover. Otis, Melvin and Vinh shoot them all, except Desroche, who wounds Otis. When Desroche then uses a hand grenade (why?) to finish the job, Melvin sacrifices himself by taking the blast. As Desroche is about to shoot Otis again, David fires from behind them and kills Desroche. Whatever Lee means these set-piece bloodbaths to signify, their main message seems to be that Quentin Tarantino had better look to his laurels.
That touches on a further issue – the breadth of Lee’s cinematic frame of reference. Da 5 Bloods has some validity as a kind of Apocalypse Now Revisited – a decidedly negative take on the return-to-Vietnam movie with repeated reminders of the land’s Heart-of-Darkness connotations. Lee’s evident debt to non-Vietnam films is another matter. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the most obvious example, though Lee’s interest in his characters’ greed for gold seems shallow. The bloods led their guide to believe they were searching only for Norm but Vinh is unsurprised when they emerge from the jungle weighed down by rucksacks full of gold bars. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to signal a cynical assumption on Vinh’s part that the men must have been looking for something more, and more financially valuable, than bones – or if Lee just neglected to give Vinh a reaction.
There are echoes too of Deliverance. As in that film, there’s a crucial wilderness episode in which a man is killed and his corpse secretly buried (although the surviving bloods’ concealment of Eddie’s death and burial is relatively short-lived); David’s leg wound is reminiscent of the injury received by the Burt Reynolds character in Deliverance. It’s true that, when it was released in 1972, some critics saw John Boorman’s horror adventure as a quasi-Vietnam picture – a tale of falsely self-confident trespassers in alien territory getting a terrible comeuppance. But the Deliverance associations, like The Treasure of Sierra Madre ones, are another distraction from the racial import of Lee’s film. And, whatever the extent of his borrowings, their cumulative effect is, like the mayhem, to send Da 5 Bloods into Tarantino territory, where reality is invariably subservient to cinema history. That’s a much bigger problem for a politically engaged filmmaker like Lee than for Tarantino, whose only moral compass seems to be movie lore.
It’s no surprise that none of this is adversely affecting the film’s impact in terms of public and critical reception. Da 5 Bloods began streaming on Netflix on 12 June, at the height of the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. At the same time, Spike Lee posted online a ninety-five-second film, Three Brothers, which intercuts footage of Floyd’s death with that of Eric Garner, killed by a white police officer’s chokehold in 2014, and clips of the slaying of Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. Even without Three Brothers, Da 5 Bloods would be widely acclaimed as urgently topical because Spike Lee’s reputation precedes him – and because the film, with that opening montage, Hanoi Hannah’s occasional pronouncements and inserts such as the Milton Olive photograph, does carry racial-political meanings – on the surface. There’s the rub. These things decorate, rather than permeate, Da 5 Bloods.
After all the anguish and bloodshed, there’s a ‘hopeful’ epilogue. It takes an age to arrive then outstays its welcome. Each survivor, as well as Melvin’s widow, gets a share of the buried treasure. They include the multi-talented Vinh: after proving himself a crack marksman as well as a knowledgeable tour guide, he helps Otis and David cash in the gold. Eddie’s share goes to Black Lives Matter, Hedy’s and Simon’s to LAMB. As intended, Norm is commemorated in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and presumably laid to rest there. Otis, Tiên and Michon enjoy a group hug. David receives a to-be-opened-in-the-event-of-my-death letter from Paul, who tells his son that he’ll always love him. A bit late now but Spike Lee apparently wants the audience to find this, and all these other concluding bits, heartwarming.
Da 5 Bloods will probably be a major awards contender. It wears its importance on its sleeve. It’s long (154 minutes). It’s draining to watch – though largely because it’s long, and excessive. The music cuts deeper than most of the film’s elements – the voice of Marvin Gaye throughout, singing the title song and other tracks from What’s Going On (1971), Terence Blanchard’s restless, sonorous score. From an early stage, though, Blanchard’s music creates a strange impression – it’s beautiful but it seems to be describing what’s happening in a film that isn’t the one we’re seeing. That impression is all too apt. There’s a disjuncture between the picture that Spike Lee asserts he’s making and the one he’s actually made. He’s taken a spec script about white soldiers, and ideas from movies made and largely peopled by white men (the Laurence Fishburne and Albert Hall characters in Apocalypse Now are rare exceptions). Lee seems to insist that, by putting African Americans on the screen, he’s thereby transforming the meanings of his source material. This is just what he fails to do.
16 June 2020
