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)