Summary:
Set on the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn. A snapshot of a neighborhood dealing with racial tensions.
My Thoughts:
So this is why people say Spike Lee is a great filmmaker; I can finally say I get it. Every film I’ve seen from Spike Lee (up until this film) has always come across so ridiculously heavy-handedly that I find myself gagging as he shoves messages down my throat. “Do The Right Thing” is the most natural feeling movie I’ve seen from Lee. It feels as if he’s approaching the same topics he always addresses (racial tensions) but with far more subtlety; he does it almost perfectly- almost.
I loved this film, far more so than anything else I’ve ever seen from Lee, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to almost anyone… but again, Lee’s own heavy handedness keeps me from giving this a perfect score. In the last ten minutes I felt as if Lee sabotages a ton of the work he does by undermining the themes he’s worked so hard to develop and leaving us with two diametrically opposed views. I can tell Lee was angry about the state of affairs when he made this film (and he’s still angry), but it seems to me that he’s not one-hundred-percent certain where to channel that anger. This film cemented in my mind the voice Lee truly does have. I think if he could learn to tone things back, even a little bit, he could make a masterpiece, but unfortunately, as thirty years of films following this movie have shown us, Lee doesn’t seem to want to tone it back.
“Always do the right thing.” “That’s it?” “That’s it.”
On the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn, Mookie (Spike Lee, director of “Blackkklansman”) goes to work at a Pizzeria joint owned by Sal (Danny Aiello, “Moonstruck”) and his racist son Pino (John Turturro, “Barton Fink”). As temperatures and tensions rise at the pizzeria, Mookie navigates the block, running into a whole variety of characters like Da Mayor (Ossie Davis, “Bubba Ho-Tep”), Mister Senor Love Dady (Samuel L Jackson, “Jurassic Park”) Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn, “Spider-Man (2002)”), and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee, “American Gangster”).
The best part about this film is all of the characters and the way those characters work to create a realistic and compelling snapshot of a neighborhood. This isn’t a film that follows a traditional narrative arc so much as it does address an important social issue and the way it’s looked at today, and the way that it addresses this issue feels relatively unique. By setting this story on the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn, the environment itself bodes of how stuffy and stressed out everyone feels about the current situation, and in a way it sets the atmosphere to boiling before the film even begins. Doing this illustrates where Lee thinks our current racial situation is; he knows it’s bad, everyone knows it’s bad- but also everyone is alright with just keeping the peace and ignoring the underlying issues.
I think this is what Lee is really trying to get at: if you look at how far we have come as a country since the Jim Crow Laws, the march at Selma, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr for the most part, people have outwardly changed their ways, but Lee is trying to get us to see that unless we get to the heart of the issue, the underlying racing, nothing has really changed. There’s a great ironic moment when Danny Aiello and John Turturro’s characters have a heart to heart about how the African American community has been good to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and how he should not to be racist to their patrons, but then when some of the African community complains about how the “Wall of Fame”, which shows famous people that have visited the pizzeria, has a lack of African American pictures, Aiello’s character refuses to do anything about it, saying it’s his restaurant.
(SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW)
Towards the end of this film, after Radio Raheem walks into Sal’s shop with his boom box blaring and refuses to turn it down and Sal eventually bashes the radio with a baseball bat, a fight breaks out, but the the violence really erupts when Mookie throws a trash can through Sal’s window. Radio Raheem ends up getting killed in the scuffle by a horde of cops, and as they wheel his body away, the street looks night apocalyptic. If the film would’ve ended there, this movie would’ve received a perfect score from me, because that scene illustrates everything Lee was trying to say without going over the top, but, unfortunately, Lee just can’t leave well enough alone. He goes on to continue to attack the same issue for another ten minutes, leaving us with two incredibly lengthy blocks of text, one a quote from Martin Luther King Jr and the final quote being from Malcolm X. Both quotes were about racial injustices and what to do about them, only King’s advocated for nonviolence and X’s said that violence was sometimes necessary, that it could be considered self-defense. The combination of leaving us with X’s quote as a last thought, and the image of Mookie (played by Lee) throwing a trashcan through a window, lets me know that Lee thinks violence can be used as a means of protesting injustices, and that is something I fundamentally disagree with. Violence only breeds destruction, as illustrated by Lee’s own film. I can’t give this film a perfect score when I think the final ten minutes essentially champion a very dangerous idea; I can see Lee’s point of view, but I can’t agree with it.
Verdict:
This is a great movie; I honestly loved it up until those last ten minutes. I think this is easily Lee’s most subtle, most intelligent film to date, but when it comes down to the heart of the issue, I disagree with him about how he approaches changing injustices. I know that as a white, straight, cisgender male I don’t really have the right to comment on minority’s perspectives on racial injustices, but I do think I have a right to voice my opinion on how protests should be approached. In the end, I have to believe and have faith that God will help peace outweigh violence; good will outweigh bad; love will outweigh hate.
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