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Archive for the ‘John David Washington’ Category

BlackKlansman

25 Jul

BlackKlansman—directed by Spike Lee. Comic Spy Drama. 135 minutes Color 2018.
★★★★★
The Story: A black and a while men play Cyrano to one another as they infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
~
Of course! The vividness of Spike Lee’s energy and eye! The narrative imagination of Lee! The color behind the color! Lee’s launch of subjects and themes into their rashest limits! Why would anyone want to resist?

If it were not for the disappointments! If it were not for the infidelities to his medium! If it were not for his arrogance!

Stunning is Lee’s presentation of the speech of Stokely Carmichael before a gathering in Colorado Springs in the ‘70s, and brilliant Lee’s offering to us the impression of it upon those black folks listening.

What’s brilliant on the screen becomes recognizable. What’s not brilliant becomes a rut. What’s brilliant about this scene is the performance of a brilliant speech brilliantly by the actor Corey Hawkins and the simplicity of the camera in giving it to us.

What is also brilliant is the slow montage of dark close-ups of black faces, faces only, impassive, motionless, disembodied, as they absorb what Stokely Carmichael is saying. Of course those faces are not new to Carmichael: their hair-styles are already open to his views.

But what counts is that we see no emotion in their eyes. The story by their stillness delivers to us the contents of Carmichael’s speech directly, which we as the audience, also an audience, get with our own impassive faces impressed by what we are hearing, as though hearing it for the first time, which for many of us we are.

The hairdos of the black listeners may be wrong, but their faces, impassive as ours, allow us to be one with the moment a movement emerges. The movement goes on, or its content does. That’s a fiction good as a fact.

What are the obstacles in black folks as a whole which prevent their success?

If there is an answer to this question, the question is not even broached by the film.

What it gives us instead is the incompetence and silliness of the Klan. And David Dukes its leader, discretely played by Toper Grace, does not hate black people, as all the local Colorado Springs Klansmen must do: Dukes loves blacks: he simply wants complete segregation. In this, he is at emotional, polemical, and political odds with prejudice of any kind. Funny without saying so.

The story the film tells is how Dukes’ clan was duped by a well-spoken black police detective into encouraging a white detective who took the black man’s name to become an Intelligence wire inside Klan headquarters.

What a funny story! What derring-do! What cleverness in a black officer to lead the investigation and eventually thwart the assassination of the black student leader.

But the movie goes off track by becoming a tract. And which tract? There were so many black tracts in those days. It is as though Lee wished to to leave no outrage unpresented and thus to accommodate them all. To accommodate none would have been right.

The young actress called upon to play an Angela Davis-type organizer is called upon to deliver a line of racial argument as conversation during her wooing by the main character, and this tract falls flat, either because the actress is incapable of making it real, or because it is badly written, or because Lee cannot manage to be creatively behind it in this film, where it does not belong, even though he has clearly felt it was necessary and funny. It is neither. And we lose the story in the side-lining of this irrelevant romance.

Lee has the bad habit of collapsing a fictional story into documentary. He introduces Harry Belafonte to tell the story of the the public dismemberment and incineration by a mob of a backward black boy said to have make a pass at a white woman.

Belafonte-and-the-story is enough. But Lee ornaments the scene with black folks holding placards of postcards sold from photographs taken of this ghastly event combined with the horrified on-camera responses of those listening to it and turns the story into a protest march, and the point is lost. We, before our screen, not the audience of black folks in the film, are all the audience needed for that story. Without our audience-job, we are left with nothing to participate in, as Lee, does everything and so steals the movie from us.

Why mention these things? Because with them, they sabotage our faith in the story, whatever that is.

Whatever that is, Lee has cast the good guys and the bad guys perfectly. And they play their parts perfectly. Alex Baldwin as a proto-bigot undergoing the train wreck of recording a TV speech seizes the available satire by the scruff of its neck and shakes it for all it’s worth.

But Lee is even more favored in his principal players. First in Adam Driver as the stand-in for the black klansman. His part is the best written part in the film, and he fills it to the brim and over.

John David Washington is perfectly cast as Ron Stallworth, the black Colorado Springs Intelligence officer who in real life actually performed the neat feat of infiltrating the Klan as his white double played by Driver. Washington knows exactly how to seize the comic opportunities Lee has given him, from patting his Afro at the start to dancing a wild jig in Lee’s dancehall version of the stage shows of black singers then. Washington has the inner nature for the part, which must be played as he does play it on the comic brink of a well-spoken tongue-in-cheek interloper into the world of white bigots.

I write this way that you shall be fairly warned of the perils and pleasures awaiting you for a film you must see, because of the director’s unique imagination and visual vivacity. His spirit.

All film is entertainment. That we should entertain the contents of a work of art for a time is what the entertainment value of all art means. To entertain must be a film’s foremost concern and intent. How to do that?

Sometimes Lee forgets he is making a film, and thinks he is in a pulpit, forgetting that pulpits are boring, for their threats are redundant thunder. Never mind that. Lee is still in a film. Our job is to love the dickens out of him and to continue to pursue the valuable delights he has made for our inspection and glee.

 
 
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