Do the Right Thing (1989)

USA, 120 minutes
Director/writer: Spike Lee
Photography: Ernest R. Dickerson
Music: Bill Lee
Editor: Barry Alexander Brown
Cast: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Richard Edson, Rosie Perez, Joie Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, Roger Guenveur Smith, John Savage, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, Robin Harris, Martin Lawrence, Frank Vincent

It's very possible that I overrate Spike Lee's third major feature. This makes the third time I've written about it one way or another for this blog in the past couple years and I haven't written about anything else by him and, in fact, I still need to see a lot of his pictures that people recommend. Somehow I keep coming back to this one and finding new things in it all the time, from the extraordinary work of its soundtrack, drawing on vast sources of African American music, to smaller pieces of it, such as the fluid court and spark occurring between Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and The Mayor (Ossie Davis), or the powerful performance of Dee in the final scenes.

It remains what it intends to be first and foremost, with great power: a penetrating diagram of the development and execution of a race riot, which takes place on a baking hot day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, USA. A good deal of its power, in fact, derives purely from this laser focus. Seen again, it only becomes more apparent how carefully it is put together. All the myriad tiny factors that contribute to the conflagration at the end are systematically identified, defined, laid out, put on display: the simmering hot day with no relief, the brewing complexities of resentment among the characters, the sense of boredom and desperation and hopelessness. Yet it is always full of strange byways and surprises.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

#28: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

Steven picked this a couple weeks back for his #33, and between his write-up and commenter Damon Matthew's point about how Spike Lee "piles up the oily rags and lets the spontaneous combustion take place," I think this remarkable X-ray of a race riot has been pretty well covered here. Woo hoo, day off for me!

What has always particularly attracted me is its visceral energy. As Steven alluded to, there's actually a good deal of easygoing camaraderie among the various residents and players of the Bedford-Stuyvesant block in Brooklyn where it's set, but there's an inevitable amount of tension there as well. Working that friction with attention to the small details adds up to a very big, very complex story with a lot of fascinating reverberations.

Summers of Spike

(This is my contribution to the Spike Lee Director's Chair hosted March 25-27, 2011, at LAMB.)

In many ways it's a shame that Spike Lee made far and away the greatest movie of his career, Do the Right Thing, so early on. As he is surely aware, and no doubt painfully so, African-Americans who directly address the terms of African-American experience are all too quickly pigeonholed in today's America as irrationally angry. This kind of thing has even turned into a constant refrain about Barack Obama since at least the pseudo scandal of the Reverend Wright, even though anyone with eyes to see knows that Barack Obama just might be the single most serene human being alive today—the role he knows he must play, for the obvious reasons.

Spike Lee did the right thing. Like Reggie Miller squaring up just back of the three-point stripe, he saw his opening in 1989, took his best shot, and hit nothing but net. Lucky for us. For the most part, the rest of Lee's career has been little more than the day after, heat and hearts alike broke, of that sweltering summer day he documented so brilliantly, with such purposeful, pointed anger and yet with so much care and nuance. In fact, as a recent look at it once again confirmed, it remains a hugely ambitious picture, and one worth examining closely, mulling exactly what happens in the last 40 minutes of it—what any one or all of those characters experienced and felt and what motivated them. No one is entirely innocent, no one entirely guilty.