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BLACKKKLANSMAN
Director: Spike Lee Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold, Jasper Pääkkönen, Robert John Burke, Topher Grace, Ken Garito, Brian Tarantina, Paul Walter Hauser, Ashlie Atkinson, Michael Joseph Buscemi, Alec Baldwin, Harry Belafonte MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:15 Release Date: 8/10/18 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2018 Co-writer/director Spike Lee effortlessly blends narrative and analysis with BlacKkKlansman. The film is as much an essay as it is a story, but one might not even notice, since the story being told is so strange, unique, and filled with information that seems both of its era and depressingly pertinent to the here and now. Lee and his fellow screenwriters Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, and Kevin Willmott have turned the tale of Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer who orchestrated an undercover operation into the workings of the Ku Klux Klan, into a powerful treatise about the key differences between racism and racial politics. It opens with hate. Alec Baldwin plays an alleged doctor named Kennebrew Beauregard, as he films an "educational" piece about the necessity of segregation. The screed begins with relative calmness and neutrality, if one can call the plea to continue the legal disenfranchisement of an entire segment of the population, simply because of the color of their skin, either calm or neutral. As his tirade continues, his tone becomes angrier, his rhetoric becomes more blatantly racist, and he actually starts forgetting his lines. From the start, the film assaults us with both the language and the goals of those whose politics are founded on racism, and it gives us a pair of other observations that might not be completely apparent. The first is that, the more comfortable a person like this doctor feels, the more likely he or she is to drop the "intellectual" argument and show us his or her true feelings. The second is that there's an inherent—let's be kind and call it—stupidity to such people. The doctor can hardly keep track of his epithets and stereotypes, despite the fact that he likely wrote this piece of bile himself. If your entire ideology is based on arbitrary rage, it's only a matter of time before that hatred overtakes even the basics of common sense. One could argue that common sense long disappeared from this doctor—likely before he adopted his political thinking. The success of Stallworth's sting, though, depends a lot on the basic idiocy of men and women who allow hatred to overtake their lives and thought processes. Before we get to the story proper or even that introduction, Lee gives us another image. It's from the 1939 film adaptation of Gone with the Wind, as the tragic heroine surveys the dead, wounded, and dying from a recent battle. As the camera pulls across and back from the carnage, it finally rests on an overhead shot with the flag of the Confederacy featured prominently in the foreground. Later, we get a dissection of the impact of an earlier movie, namely D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation from 1915, which takes a long time—and a lot of historical revisionism—to finally arrive at a heroic portrayal of the formation of the KKK. Lee presents the impact with dueling scenes: one of a man, played by Harry Belafonte, who was a witness to a lynching, while the other is of KKK members celebrating the new inductees by watching the 60-year-old movie with unbridled enthusiasm. The shared trait between the "educational" film, Griffith's movie, and Gone with the Wind is that they all justified racism in some way or another. The images persist here, in a story set in the 1970s, either as documents of the wounds and violence of that way of thinking or as a bit of nostalgia for a time of America's perceived greatness for those with that way of thinking. Speaking of rhetorical devices such as stating that "America" was once "great" and should be again, it will come as little surprise to those who know the origin of such catchphrases that the Klan is quite fond of chanting, "America first!" We haven't even arrived at a discussion of the main story yet, and that, perhaps, is why Lee's newest film is as sneakily effective as it is. The screenwriters, adapting Stallworth's own book, take the time to establish the history and ideology of the KKK, and they do it in a way that any movie-goer can comprehend: through the imagery and influence of the movies themselves. The film takes Griffith to task in the same way that it takes down the fictional-but-grounded-in-reality "educational" movie. The real Stallworth's story of infiltrating the Klan, using a fellow officer as a stand-in, was an ingenious act of subversion. Lee and company have followed suit, telling that tale within a bigger, subversive dissection of how cultural items influence politics and vice versa. As for the actual story, it's a doozy. John David Washington plays Stallworth, who decides to join the Colorado Springs Police Department. He's the only black officer, and after being frustrated with being relegated to the file room, he campaigns to become a detective. His first assignment is to go undercover at an event, held by a local college's black student union, featuring a prominent member of the Black Panthers. Some might raise an eyebrow at the idea of comparing a black student union to the Klan, but Lee does so, if only to show that the former group has legitimate grievances against society at large (in the present, a frightening encounter with the police and, in the past, that story about the lynching of a young man), while the other simply doesn't. With one undercover mission under his belt, Stallworth answers an ad in the local paper seeking people interested in Klan membership. With Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), a detective of Jewish descent who gradually figures out that he's as much a target of hate as Stallworth, as his stand-in, the new cop earns the trust of KKK members and the organization's head: David Duke (Topher Grace). That name will be familiar to anyone keeping track of the modern incarnation of the far right in the United States, because, while organization names may change and talking points might be made more "acceptable," ideologies like those belonging to Duke and the Klan don't die. BlacKkKlansman ends with footage of a far-right rally from 2017 that turned violent and, ultimately, deadly. If we haven't understood the reason for Lee's delving into the past of the film's own era by then, it should be painfully obvious by the end. The hatred of the past influences that of the present, and if left unchecked, it will become the future. That's the present in which we're living today. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for language throughout, including racial epithets, and for
disturbing/violent material and some sexual references)
