This is the final installment of my 2019 bi-monthly series watching Spike Lee movies I had not yet seen.It's nice to finish with a Spike Lee movie where he really "goes for it."
Lee's career has been defined by "going for it," but you can't "go for it" every time out. Perhaps out of necessity or perhaps just out of a sense of pursuing his cooler and more modest interests from time to time, Lee has kind of alternated bold, polemical statements with smaller, moodier pieces. Although I've liked both, the polemics seem to have more value, as they are more likely to be interesting failures at worst.
It would be hard to say that I've missed only the smaller, moodier pieces in Lee's career, because this series has featured a number of films that announce their themes in a shout rather than a whisper. But Chi-Raq does feel like ending on a note that is appropriately LEE, in capital letters.
The 2015 film is Lee's modern-day update of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, a play in which women withhold sex from their men as a punishment for the Peloponnesian War. That play was originally performed in 411 B.C., and I guess it just shows my ignorance that I'm surprised that sex was a textual rather than subtextual topic of a play written 2500 years ago. I need to brush up on my classics.
Of course the setting is Chicago, hence the title. The murder rate in Chicago has been sky high for quite some time now, leading to a nickname that compared it to a war zone, like the one that has hosted two major wars in the last 30 years. I have friends in Chicago and they seem to go about their lives pretty much violence free, but there are, of course, places they never go.
Lee's showing us those places in Chi-Raq, as he introduces us to a handful of key characters. There's the title character, born Demetrius Dupree, a rapper and gangster played by Nick Cannon (which surprised me, as Cannon has primarily taken on lighter fare in the past). There's his chief rival, a gangster nicknamed Cyclops (Wesley Snipes wearing an eye patch). There's Chi-Raq's girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), who starts to wake up to the horrors of what her man and others are doing after she takes refuge in the home of a neighbor following a shooting and case of arson at and outside her house. That neighbor is Helen Worthy (Angela Bassett), a non-violence advocate who plants the seed that flowers into Lysistrata gathering an ever-larger group of women to go on a sex strike, as a desperate attempt to stop the killing. A number of familiar and not-so-familiar faces fill out the cast, including Samuel L. Jackson in what amounts to a narrator role.
What makes Lee's film all the more ambitious is that the majority of it is told in verse. It's a clever and at times potent way to both acknowledge the classical roots of the source material, while marrying that with modern African-American creative forms that already involve rhyming, like rap. It's just one way in which the film joins consummately realistic elements with those that are clearly fanciful.
Lee leaves no doubt about his ambitions from the film's very start, filling the screen with statistics comparing murders in Chicago over a period of the 21st century with American deaths in foreign wars during that period, which also drives home the comparison to Iraq. Before even introducing the characters, he also gives us a solemn dose of the words of a preacher, talking about the terrible human and community costs of black men killing other black men. It's Lee signaling the serious intentions of his film before leavening them a bit with humor and farce.
Given how Lee establishes the stakes as by and about black men, it was a significant surprise that he gives his most lengthy diatribe to a white man. John Cusack plays local pastor Mike Corridan, who I learned after the film is based on a real man in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, whose skin color has no bearing on the extent to which he's loved and respected by his black congregation. One of the victims of the constant warfare is a young girl, and Corridan gives a fiery speech at her funeral decrying the conditions -- both external and self-inflicted -- that have left this community in its current sorry state.
I kept waiting for Lee to undercut Cusack's character in some way, but I guess I underestimated the man. He's never been so simple as "white bad, black good," and in case you're looking for that kind of thing, there is a bad (or at least terminally self-interested) white character played by D.B. Sweeney, the Chicago mayor. And there are any number of other characters with darker skin tones who get their own diatribes. But this centerpiece scene perhaps struck me more a) because it involves a pastor, who has rhetorical tools that exceed those of an average person, and b) because Cusack plays the scene so convincingly. It's not the type of role I'd seen Cusack undertake before, and I had the sense he wasn't really up to it at this stage of his career.
Lee delivers the material with a balance of fun and sobriety, of outrageousness and even sometimes subtlety. There are big choreographed numbers involving oodles of extras, including one where different groups of people in different locations sing and dance along to the Chi-Lites' "Oh Girl." It reminded me a bit of how Lee uses "Too Late to Turn Back Now" -- a song from the same year as "Oh Girl," 1972 -- in BlacKkKlansman. I was loving Chi-Raq for the first half. And then ...
... well, and then I'm not really sure. And then I got tired, I can say that much for sure. I've been solo parenting this week as my wife recovers from oral surgery, and on Wednesday night that had definitely taken something out of me. I might have even slept for some portions of the second half, though it's hard to tell which parts I might have actually missed and which parts are just hazy because I was sleepy.
In all, I gave it 3.5 stars but was wavering on the verge of a 4. It's definitely not an interesting failure, it's an interesting success. But I was prepared for it to be even more of a success than it ended up being, as the film took some steps backward for me in the second half. Whether that's a deserved criticism or just the reality that I was exhausted, I may not know until I see it again.
I can tell you that in a sea of otherwise superlative performances, I was a bit disappointed by the work of the film's one Oscar winner, Jennifer Hudson. She plays the mother of the girl who was caught in the crossfire, and she's also the only one whose reactions to the events of the story don't seem quite correct. I suppose Lee might be heightening her character to go along with his chosen approach of relying on verse, and that any time you are responding to the death of your daughter through the rhythms of archaic poetry rather than the immediacy of sadness and rage, something is going to be lost. But I did expect a little more from Hudson.
There are enough choice nuggets in Chi-Raq that I'm sure to leave any discussion of this film prematurely, but it's the holiday season and I've got a lot of other things to do.
Besides, I have to give you at least a little recap of Un-lee-shed.
Just as a reminder, I started in February with She's Gotta Have It, and from there, every two months, followed with School Daze, Mo' Better Blues, 4 Little Girls, Miracle at St. Anna, and Chi-Raq. Mo' Better Blues was an emergency replacement for Get on the Bus, which I could not source. That remains one of only three Lee films I won't have seen at the end of this series, along with Girl 6 and Clockers.
Considering that Lee has had some real stinkers in his career -- I'm looking at you, She Hate Me -- I was glad to see that I didn't dislike any of the films I watched for this series. The closest to disliking one of them would have to be Miracle at St. Anna, but that film struck me with a particular kind of dilemma. Because I knew it was critically scorned, I felt like I was deducting points from it that maybe it didn't deserve to have deducted. I went with a 2.5 stars for that one, but it easily could have been 3. I liked most of what it was trying to do, and with a few exceptions, it was executed pretty well.
However, neither do I come to the end of this series feeling like I have a number of new and interesting takeaways about the man. The range of star ratings for these six movies was only 2.5 to 4, with 4 Little Girls earning the high and St. Anna the low. I'm unable to comment on the ones that remain unseen, of course, but it looks like I had seen most of the "essential Lee" before I got started, even if I had not seen either of the films he made before Do the Right Thing, at least one of which should probably be thought of as essential.
Still, I'd say I gained an additional context and understanding about some of Lee's work, in some cases how it relates to the work of other black artists, or to black culture on the whole. For one, School Daze helped broaden my understanding of HBCUs, which would be the focal point of Beyonce's Homecoming, which I watched just a few weeks ago. Some of what Beyonce did in that Coachella concert was a specific shout-out to School Daze, although enough time had passed between my two viewings that I failed to identify what.
4 Little Girls gave me a real education on a pocket of black history that I am not as familiar with as I should be. The testimonies of the affected parties were extremely moving, even decades after the events in question, and I was really impressed by the way Lee deemphasized his own idiosyncrasies and showier techniques in the face of that important subject matter.
Two of the films in this series also reminded me of the extreme range of Lee's abilities, and how we can't really pin down the parameters of "a Spike Lee film" -- or "joint," in his parlance -- because he's constantly challenging himself to do new and interesting things. His first film, for example, reminded me of someone like Jim Jarmusch, who had never seemed a tempting point of comparison for Lee in the past. Then I also got to see Lee's version of a war epic, something I would have never guessed interested him until he actually made it.
In short, Spike Lee contains multitudes, and watching six more of his films was a good reminder of that.
I haven't yet decided what my bi-monthly series will be in 2020. I'm tossing up either another deep dive into the unseen films of a major artist, or possibly a themed series that's specific to me and my viewings.
I can assure you, when I decide, you will be the first to know.
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