Spike Lee's Best Movie Since BAMBOOZLED -- Maybe His Best Ever!

Rating: 8/10 (29 August 2018)

I've never been a fan of Spike Lee's movies, not because I disagree with his angry views but because as works of entertainment his pictures always impressed me as being profoundly mediocre. With a few notable exceptions, (such as the superb cultural study BAMBOOZLED), a typical Spike Lee Joint is shrill, preachy, and one-dimensional, with flat characters, forced comic situations, a lot of lecturing and very little action.
But this movie is different. This powerful, action packed police drama made me totally rethink the limits of Spike Lee's talent.
For the first time in his career, Spike shows subtlety and restraint. He allows the characters to live and grow on screen, instead of just shouting at each other. He allows the story to make the points he wants to make, instead of just stopping the action so the characters can lecture the audience.
The power of this movie comes from the fact that the storytelling is very quiet, almost low-key. When the black cop calls up the Klan and tries to enroll, at first it seems like a prank. But soon it becomes very serious. And when the Jewish cop has to step in as the "double" of the invisible Klan recruit, you can feel the tension building just in the way Flip Zimmerman becomes better and better at playing a racist white man who hates Jews. John David Washington is a classic leading man, but Adam Diver really steals the show as the complex and conflicted Zimmerman. This is the first Spike Lee movie I've ever seen where a white man is something other than a menace or a buffoon. ("But black men are portrayed that way all the time!" I know, Spike. I know.)
It was so obvious that this time out Spike was working with better camera people, better film editors, and a better composer to write the haunting musical score. As the cops, black radicals, and Klansmen rushed headlong to their final showdown, with a literal ticking bomb to provide suspense, I didn't feel like I was being preached to or bullied. I felt like I was caught up in the story . . . caught up in the action. And I didn't want the story to end.
This isn't a perfect movie, of course. There were some awkward moments, some characters that didn't work out. Young Corey Hawkins effortlessly delivers the goods as a fiery orator, while an aging Harry Belafonte struggles to project emotion as he recounts a lynching from decades ago. It's also interesting that Spike Lee has moved on from challenging the Jewish and Italian racists in his own beloved NYC, in movies like DO THE RIGHT THING, and is now more interested in a can't-miss attack on a culturally acceptable basket of ignorant hillbilly stereotypes. On the one hand, I appreciated the subtlety of naming one of the Klansmen "Ivanhoe." (Sir Walter Scott's white fantasy of European chivalry set the pattern for the all-white escapism of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Martin alike.) On the other hand, setting up the mean Klansman's fat and ugly wife to be the ultimate villain in the film panders to a whole lot of prejudices that have nothing to do with racism.
It's no accident that the ridiculously mannered Anthony Lane at the NEW YORKER sneered at the evil Klan wife in his review as a "doofus." To a bejeweled dowager like Anthony Lane, all poor white people are ridiculous and contemptible. Lane is so eager to flaunt his class privilege that he's even willing to pretend to admire Spike Lee. And Spike is happy to flatter his upper-class prejudices in order to get his story told. It's a beautifully symbiotic relationship. But the snobbery and hypocrisy of the liberal elite only intensifies the appeal of Donald Trump . . . or the Ku Klux Klan. Spike Lee can't be expected to solve this problem, but sooner or later the liberal elite will have to confront it. There will always be poor whites who resent minorities, but ninnies like Anthony Lane and magazines like the NEW YORKER aren't part of the solution . . . they're part of the problem.