TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/070389/07038900.023

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 104 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!"