The Movie Moment: Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This afternoon, Spike Lee will be awarded the Wexner Prize by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The festivities include a month-long retrospective of Lee’s work, which enabled me to finally see Do the Right Thing on the big screen. I was too young to see the film in theatres on its first release, but I’ve watched it dozens of times on VHS and DVD in the intervening years. Lee's masterpiece has been one of my favorite films for a long time, but it never had nearly as much of an effect on me as it did on this most recent viewing. As much as any widescreen epic or special-effects spectacular, Do the Right Thing practically demands to be seen on the big screen.

One important element of the film that can’t be fully appreciated at home is the way Lee re-creates the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in which the film takes place. In Do the Right Thing, this isn’t simply the backdrop for the story, but a vibrant place. Lee presents a flurry of human activity, both seen and heard, and he’ll sometimes foreground characters in one scene only to put them in the background in the next. Lee’s Bed-Stuy always feels like a place where people really live. But as Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy asks, “are we gonna live together? Together, are we gonna live?”

On the hot summer day during which most of Do the Right Thing’s action occurs, the answer to Love Daddy’s question is in doubt. With so many people living on top of each other, there’s already plenty of tension in the air. There’s friction between the African-Americans and the Puerto Ricans who live in Bed-Stuy. Nobody seems happy about gentrification, personified by the Celtics-loving Clifton (John Savage). And there’s some lingering resentment towards the local business owners, a Korean family that has recently opened a convenience store, and even Sal (Danny Aiello), who for years has run the pizzeria with his sons and employs the film’s audience surrogate Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a delivery boy.

Meanwhile, smaller bits of tension pile up on top of each other. Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) makes a stink about the “American-Italians only” pictures on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Sal’s son Pino (John Turturro) can’t keep his racist tendencies in check, and occasionally rails against the neighborhood and its residents. Radio Raheem’s (Bill Nunn) Public Enemy-blasting boom box antagonizes many of those he meets, especially Sal. And then there’s the NYPD, who occasionally drive through, casting suspicious eyes in everyone. Lee shoots many of these moments at tilted angles to create unease in the audience, and the tilts grow ever more extreme as the film progresses. All the while, Lee is saying that these conflicts are a reality in our country, and all it takes is one small spark to make them explode, as they do in Do the Right Thing’s climactic sequence, in which Radio Raheem is killed by the cops and Sal’s store is burned to the ground.

Yet watching the film again, amid all the violence, I was drawn more than ever to its most empathetic character, an elderly seen-it-all drunk called Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis. Da Mayor is the most ubiquitous supporting player in the film, often hovering over the action when he’s not actively taking part in it. Several times in the film, he’s disrespected by others, but he’s kind to everyone. Even as the tension at Sal’s comes to a head, Da Mayor calls for a peaceful resolution, and eventually he leads Sal and sons away from the rioting to (relative) safety.

Most moving of all are his scenes with Mother Sister, played by Ruby Dee, Davis’ real-life wife. At first, Mother Sister puts him down, proclaiming him “a drunk fool.” Their early scenes together are shot at the same severe angles as the other arguments in the film. But after Da Mayor brings Mother Sister some flowers as a peace offering, the shot composition of their scenes changes. As the sun begins to set, Mother Sister thanks him for saving a young boy, and from this scene onward, their conversations are shot with a level frame, indicating that the friction between these two has given way to a deeper understanding for each other. As if to punctuate his point, the shot of Da Mayor reacting to Mother Sister’s thanks is framed with a streetlight in the background, and as his face brightens, the light flickers on.

At the time of its release, many critics interpreted Do the Right Thing as an attempt to incite racially-motivated violence. Perhaps they were confused with the film’s final quotations, one from Dr. Martin Luther King advocating understanding, the other from Malcolm X arguing about the intelligence of violence in self-defense. But it’s clear to me that Lee sees them as two sides of the same coin: empathize if you can, fight back if you must. Now more than ever, the film plays less as a incitement to violence than to empathy, as set forth in Dr. King’s quote:

“[Violence] is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding… It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.”

Throughout the film, characters are so intent on shouting each other down that they won’t step back and listen, and this as much as the sweltering heat finally leads to the climactic tragedies. It’s for this reason- among many, many others- that Do the Right Thing remains the crowning work of Spike Lee’s fascinating career, and one of the greatest and most important American films ever made. And that, to once again quote Love Daddy, is the quintessential truth, Ruth.

Links to previous Movie Moment posts can be found by clicking here.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Regarding Henry (1991, Mike Nichols)

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the past four decades, the career of Mike Nichols has gone through its share of ups and downs. Nichols made his name as a director with a number of popular, acclaimed films, but he also has several inexplicable films to answer for. I might have spotlighted 2000’s awful What Planet Are You From? had Nathan Rabin not done so already. But Regarding Henry is a more than acceptable alternative, with the bonus of demonstrating the worst tendencies of Nichols’ later films.

Nichols has long been one of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers for classy star vehicles, particularly “dramedies” geared to adults like Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge, and Primary Colors. But much of Nichols’ enduring critical rep still rests on his seminal early classics Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and (my favorite) Carnal Knowledge. Without these films, Nichols would be little more than a slightly more upscale version of Lasse Hallstrom.

In short, Regarding Henry is a pandering comfort blanket of a movie that’s smothering instead of cozy. It’s also a textbook White-Collar Guilt movie, in which an affluent protagonist (in this case, a lawyer played by Harrison Ford) suffers a tragedy (here, a shooting that causes memory loss) that forces him into a crisis of conscience that makes him a better person. Movies like this invariably divide people into two categories- morally-compromised rich people, and salt-of-the-earth poor people. This dichotomy feels like a cynical attempt on Hollywood’s part to flatter the less financially successful viewers while allowing the more privileged to vicariously experience the hero’s awakening before speeding home in their BMWs.

Regarding Henry, based on the first produced screenplay by Jeffrey (later J.J.) Abrams, contains no surprises on this front. In fact, the film is so intent on concentrating on the psychological stuff that it skates right through the physical healing process. Once Henry learns to walk and talk (his first word is “Ritz,” the significance of which feels like a bad joke) again, he’s soon ready to go home. After he arrives back in his expensive apartment, everything happens as it should- his once-rocky marriage is quickly mended, he becomes a better father, all that. Heck, the movie begins with Henry successfully smooth-talking a jury in defense of a hospital that’s being sued by a dying old man. If you can’t see where that subplot is going, then congratulations, because you’ve finally seen your first movie! Too bad it’s this one. And let’s not get started on the film’s simplistic view of minorities, especially Bill Nunn’s ever-cheerful Magical Black Man caregiver.

After his shooting, Henry’s memory loss causes him to regress to a state of childlike naïveté. But while Ford is about the 500th actor one would cast to play childlike, the movie itself does a bang-up job of regressing to a grade-school mindset. Regarding Henry is a movie in which the hero’s problems are solved by getting a puppy, moving to a new house, quitting his job, and pulling his daughter out of her exclusive boarding school. Sure, the money won’t hold out forever, but you don’t think about those things when you’re young, do you? The way Regarding Henry paints it, it’s a wonder more rich people haven’t tried to put themselves through the profound spiritual experience of getting shot in the head.

Click here for previous When Good Directors Go Bad posts.

The Screengrab : bill nunn

The Movie Moment: Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

When Good Directors Go Bad: Regarding Henry (1991, Mike Nichols)