By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Review of BlacKkKlansman
It has been 18 years since Bamboozled, with its bold but rather scrambled-hash lampooning of
stereotypes from the blackface “coon” shows of the Jim Crow era (and its slightly
smug take on black talents who mined a living from the types). In those 18 years
Spike Lee has made some strong documentaries, but his dramatic works that I’ve
seen tend to be remarkably uneven. Now comes BlacKkKlansman, an angry, lively comedy, almost as jammed and
awkward as its title. The story is inevitably hung with the message bells and wake-up
whistles that Lee prefers. His plots come with signs that say “Remember this?”
or “Important point!”
The source is a memoir by Ron Stallworth, about his time
exposing the Ku Klux Klan as a young cop in Colorado Springs (a city notable
for its right-wing elements). Although black, Ron (played by John David
Washington) joins the Klan, using as his cover for the sting his new partner,
Skip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Skip, white and wired (and muddled about being
Jewish), goes as Ron to the risky hate dates. The real Ron talks with bigots on
the phone, using amusing white-speak to gull Imperial Wizard David Duke. Topher
Grace’s dull-drip venom as Duke, the Klan’s only conspicuous modern politician, is far
less imposing than the black power fire-breathing of Cory Hawkins as Kwame Ture (the
former Stokely Carmichael).
The script, partly by Kevin Wilmott, maker of the
brilliant satire C.S.A.: Confederate
States of America, has moved Ron’s story from the late ‘70s to 1972, picking
up rancid Nixon-Agnew vibes and the Afro-dashiki time of Blaxploitation films (already,
to Ron and his new girlfriend they are nostalgia tokens). No neo-Nazi goons
this time, but we get the usual KKKrud; louts, beerheads and dirtball dodos. A cartoonish
Klan wife, Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), lolls in bed like a squeeze-toy blob, chirping
about the coming race war. Movies have really exhausted the ritual Klan tropes,
so Lee reaches for timely resonance with a spoken foretaste of Trump, and closes
with footage of the tragic 2017 riot in Charlottesville, Va.
The Coen Brothers’s O Brother Where Art Thou? and Tarantino’s Django Unchained got more edge
and pop from their stylized rednecks (the dialog crackles with the “n-word,” a
footnote to Lee’s long feud with Tarantino about its use). In a solid cast Washington
is sly and effective, but Adam Driver virtually takes command as Skip. With his big body, drawly delivery and oddly
amiable aura of implied threat, Driver may be the best heir of the Mitchum manner since the arrival of Clive
Owen. A touching cameo comes from old (91) civil rights champ Harry Belafonte,
telling young blacks about vile racist terror.
His speech is intercut with the Klan’s idiotic initiation
ceremony for Ron (Skip). The kluxers treat themselves to D.W. Griffith’s racist
classic The Birth of a Nation, guffawing
piously as blacks catch hell. The clips underline one of film’s most
embarrassing truths: Griffith, back in “primitive” 1915, was more effective at
racial melodrama than any director since. His Klan scenes remain the most
frightening, because those scary men in sheets are shown triumphant.
SALAD (List)
12 Movies Featuring
the KKK
Clearly, Mississippi has the best sheet supply:
The Birth of
a Nation (director D.W. Griffith,
1915), Black Legion (Archie Mayo,
1937), Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler,
1951), The Black Klansman (Ted V.
Mikels, 1966), The Klansman (Terence
Young, 1974), Mississippi Burning (1988), Murder in Mississippi (Roger Young, 1990), A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996), O Brother Where Art Thou? (Joel, Ethan Coen, 2000), C.S.A: Confederate States of America
(Kevin Wilmott, 2004), Mississippi Cold
Case (David Ridgin, 2007) and BlacKkKlansman
(Spike Lee, 2018).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
No
one who worked in the old Hollywood system was more racially progressive than
Orson Welles, who knew all the games that got played. Hedda Hopper tried to
squelch his affair with singer-actor Lena Horne. When much later his friend
Henry Jaglom said, “They put makeup on (Horne) to look darker in movies,
because they didn’t want her to look white,” Orson set him straight: “The
movies that they made her look darker in, those were the race movies only for black audiences. I was
on the set waiting to take her to lunch when she did Cabin in the Sky, and she was made up like she would be with her own
(light) skin color. But when she was 15 and 16 and 17 she made a lot of those
race quickies.” (Quotes from Jaglom’s My
Lunches With Orson).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
As
in Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson’s
definitive way with the n-word in Jackie
Brown “ignited debate. In Tarantino context (with Blaxploitation sources: Boss Nigger, The Legend of Nigger Charley,
etc.) the freighted word hooks solidarity, curls contempt, funnels rage – and
allows Jackson his verbal sport. Of his n-talk, Jackson gave his reason to
Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited:
It’s my story, isn’t it?” (From the Pam
Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book
Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Lillian
Gish, front and center, sees the Klan as her savior at the climax of The Birth of a Nation (Griffith
Productions, 1915; director D.W. Griffith, cinematographer Billy Bitzer).
No comments:
Post a Comment