TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.023

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 62

Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight


By Richard Corliss


    DO THE RIGHT THING
    Directed and Written by Spike Lee

    On the hottest day of the year, good people can do bad
things. Especially in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn's black
ghetto where the crime rate sizzles and hopes evaporate in the
summer glare. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is the story of a
day in the death of the American Dream.

    The day starts calmly enough, as if the people on Lee's
Stuyvesant Avenue are the cheerful graduating class of Sesame
Street. Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) spreads inebriated wisdom, Uncle
Remus-style. Sal (Danny Aiello), the Italian American who runs
the corner pizzeria, brags that the locals "grew up on my
food." His delivery boy, Mookie (Lee), doles out advice while
dodging duties to his girlfriend and their child. Radio Raheem
(Bill Nunn) keeps the block pulsing to the rap song, Fight the
Power, that bleats from his boom box. By day's end, though, the
neighborhood has erupted. Sal and Raheem start fighting about
the loud music; the cops arrive and, in the struggle, kill
Raheem; Mookie throws a trash can through his employer's
window; the place goes up in a puff of black rage.

    The rage of race is exactly what has stirred a righteous
debate over Lee's movie. After it lost the top prize at last
month's Cannes Film Festival (to a comedy by another young
American, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape), jury
member Sally Field told Lee she fought to get him a prize. The
film's detractors called it facile and irresponsible; Lee
responded by accusing his critics of racism.

    With this week's U.S. release of Do the Right Thing, the
furor goes Stateside. Not since the Black Panthers cowed
Manhattan's glitterati 20 years ago has there been such a
virulent outbreak of radical chic -- or so many
political-disease detectives ready to stanch the epidemic. A
single issue of the Village Voice ran eight articles on the
movie, with opinions running from raves to cries of "fascist"
and "racist." A political columnist for New York magazine
charged that Lee's film could undermine the New York City
mayoral campaign of a black candidate. Everywhere, the film has
polarized white liberals for whom Bed-Stuy is as exotic and
unknowable as Burkina Faso. Some see Lee as the movies' great
black hope; others tut till they're tuckered. A few fear that Do
the Right Thing could trigger the kind of riot it dramatizes and
perhaps condones.

    The 32-year-old auteur (She's Gotta Have It, School Daze)
must be enjoying his prominence as the angry young man of the
don't-worry, be-happy '80s. Of all the blacks who have strutted
through the studio door that Eddie Murphy kicked down, Lee is
the one who won't settle for being a Murphy manque. Sure, he
markets himself cannily, as a performer in Air Jordan
commercials, and with books and The Making of . . . spinoffs of
his own movies. But Lee will not be ingratiating; he wants to be
accepted on his own rude terms. Same goes for Do the Right
Thing.

    To accept the film, though, one must first understand its
point of view, and that is maddeningly difficult. All we know
for certain is that Do the Right Thing is not naturalistic.
Golden sunset hues swathe the street at 10 in the morning. The
color scheme is chicly coordinated, as if Jerome Robbins'
Sharks and Jets were about to dance onscreen; the picture could
be called Bed-Stuy Story, full of Officer Krupkes and kindly
store owners. At first, the dilemmas are predictably pastel
too: populist cliches brought to life by an attractive cast.
Even the racial epithets have a jaunty tinge, as in a series of
antibrotherhood jokes made by blacks, Italians, Hispanics,
white cops and Korean grocers -- the film's best sequence. On
this street there are no crack dealers, hookers or muggers, just
a 24-hour deejay named Mister Senor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson),
who punctuates every mellow bellow with "And that's the truth,
Ruth!"

    But what is the truth of Do the Right Thing? Whose side is
Lee on? Is the movie a revolutionary scream or a fatalistic
shrug? Lee leaves plenty of hints -- contradictory epigrams
from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, a dedication to
families of blacks slain by police, graffiti proclaiming TAWANA
(Brawley) TOLD THE TRUTH -- but no coherent clues. Lee cagily
provides a litmus test for racial attitudes in 1989, but he does
so by destroying the integrity of his characters, black and
white. They vault from sympathetic to venomous in the wink of
a whim. One minute, Sal delivers a moony monologue about how
much he loves his black neighbors; the next, he is wielding a
baseball bat, bound to crack skulls. One minute, Mookie urges
caution; the next, he trashes the one store the brothers can
call home.

    In Hollywood the black man's burden is to be all things to
all people: stoic Sidney Poitier and sassy Eddie Murphy,
angelic sitcom kid and fuming rapmaster. Lee's movie bravely
tries both approaches. It gives you sweet, then rancid, but
without explaining why it turned. He holds the film like a can
of beer in a paper bag -- the cool sip of salvation on a
blistering day -- until it is revealed as a Molotov cocktail.

    The morning after igniting the riot, Mookie slinks back to
demand that Sal pay him his week's wages. Behind the camera, Lee
wants the same thing: to create a riot of opinion, then blame
viewers for not getting the message he hasn't bothered to
articulate. Though the strategy may lure moviegoers this long
hot summer, it is ultimately false and pernicious. Faced with
it, even Mister Senor Love Daddy might say, "Take a hike,
Spike!"