Cautionary tale of Black Police Officer's infiltration of the KKK proves of great interest but fictional plot strands fail to convince

Rating: 6/10 (28 August 2018)

Spike Lee's latest is based on the memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer in the Colorado Springs police department. Setting the film in 1972, Lee employs dramatic license by embellishing, changing some of the facts and developing a plot that provides the narrative with a concrete through-line.

On the plus side, Lee rather bravely links the ideological roots of the Klan with anti-semitism. Not only does he emphasize the constant anti-semitic language coming out of the mouths of the Klansmen but he also highlights David Duke's dangerous belief that an international Jewish conspiracy threatens the "purity" of the White race and the United States as well.

Lee's stance is welcome as it's a mainstream attempt to link the history of cooperation between African-Americans and the Jewish people, both historical victims of oppression. Notably there are others in the black community who disagree and blame Jews (particularly those who are well off and are in positions of power) for oppressing them.

Lee of course still has a great deal of sympathy for more militant voices and that's why he has Stallworth speak approvingly of Kwame Ture's speech during the early part of the film (unfortunately Lee's decision to present the entire long-winded speech results in slowing the narrative down considerably-all in an attempt to prove his social cred with his more militant brothers). Still, by making the undercover officer a Jew, there is no doubt that Lee recognizes there is a bond between the two groups.

Lee also must be commended for creating a great deal of believable dialogue coming out of the mouths of his fictional group of Klansmen. Despite their repugnant beliefs, there is something oddly humorous in the dialogue and one senses that Lee had a bit of fun creating all the racist "talk." The same goes for the purported true to life dialogue between Stallworth and David Duke in those phone conversations in which Stallworth gets his comeuppance over the racist KKK leader.

Among the scenes that pretty much were true to life were as follows: 1) Stallworth infiltrated the Klan by making contact with them over the phone; 2) an Undercover officer was utilized to infiltrate the Klan; 3) Stallworth was assigned to infiltrate a black college student union while they were watching a speech by Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael); 4) Stallworth had multiple conversations with David Duke (the leader of the Klan) over the phone, tricking him into believing he was white; 5) Stallworth was assigned as David Duke's bodyguard on one occasion; (6) at a Klan social club, Klan members viewed D.W. Griffith's racist 1915 film, Birth of a Nartion; and (7) the investigation into the Klan was abruptly shut down by the Colorado Police Department.

The actual investigation into the Klan by the Colorado Springs police department lasted a scant nine months or so and aside from the infiltration of the group by the undercover officer and Stallworth's one time experience as David Duke's bodyguard; this is a story that does not lend itself to much action or detailed plot developments.

Thus Lee was forced to create a few events out of whole cloth to move things along. Not all of it is successful. There is a scene where Stallworth throws a rock through a Klansmen's home in order to interrupt him from giving the undercover officer a "lie-detector test," to prove whether he's Jewish or not (plausible? Perhaps but I'm not sure).

The scene in which the Klansman entrusts his wife with attempting to bomb the black college student union (and later the home of the student union's leader), is awkward and doesn't feel like it could have happened at all (historically, there was some talk of the Klan bombing a gay bar but this never came to fruition).

Worse is Lee's invented scene in which a racist member of the police department gets his comeuppance after he's recorded on tape, admitting that he harassed the black college student union leader. This scene is particularly poor because in reality, entrenched racists usually remain in their posts and receive support from a whole network of colleagues. Here, as a matter of wish fulfillment, Lee takes him down!

The divergent scenes from the true history are basically as follows: 1) The Undercover officer was not Jewish; 2) the individual Klansmen depicted are fictional; 3) there was no bomb plot involving one of the Klansmen and his wife who were going to blow up a black college student union; 4) there was no racist fellow officer of Stallworth who gets his comeuppance in the end and 5) there was no apparent romance between Stallworth and the leader of the black student union.

There are also the usual Spike Lee "asides," which populate so many of his films. That is, he throws in gratuitous scenes which are not directly integrated into the plot. Here there's a clip from the 1939 Gone with the Wind as well as a make believe 1950s outtake tape of Alec Baldwin as a racist attempting to create a racist public service announcement (but looking bad in the process).

On the other hand, Lee's final aside is a good one: clips from the incident at Charlottesville last year in which a woman is run over by a racist in a car. The images include a now much older David Duke inciting the populace down there as well as President Trump delivering his insensitive remark citing an incorrect moral equivalence between the protesters against racism and white supremacists. The moral of course is that the Klan is alive and well in the United States even today.

Blackkklansman is a film certainly worth seeing as it tells an interesting story and serves as a cautionary tale of the incipient racism that has plagued this country since its founding. On the other hand, Lee's plotting is weak, suggesting that overall this could have been an even stronger entry in the pantheon of films that serve as a catalyst toward explaining and exposing the underbelly of fanaticism, which continues to plague this country today.