Spike Lee is in sparkling form with this
riotous social satire about a black police officer infiltrating a chapter of
the Ku Klux Klan. (9/10). Review by Patrick Compton
Spike Lee, whose Do the Right Thing so brilliantly lit up the 1980s with its
pinpoint presentation of race relations in America, is a welcome breath of
toxic air gusting through the safely lowbrow Durban movie scene in which comic book
superheroes boringly predominate.
The American black director’s latest
sulphurous work is based on a slice of reality that is hard to believe, in
which a black policeman infiltrates a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Based on the
2014 memoir of Colorado’s first American-American police officer, Ron
Stallworth, it plays less like a faithful docudrama than a social satire used
as a potent weapon to strike back at the current state of America under
President Donald Trump.
The first thing to note is that this film
is very funny, but our laughter is tinged by the knowledge that the issues
raised are deadly serious ... nothing less than the racism that currently
disfigures the country.
One critic has described this movie as a
“wildly uneven but righteous fuck you to Trump”. I’m not sure about the former
label, but there’s no disguising the latter assessment: this is Lee giving the
president and all his cohorts both barrels, suggesting that little has changed
in the US of A in the last 50 years.
The action is set in the 1970s with
Stallworth, complete with radical afro hairdo, joining the Colorado Police as
their first black recruit. As beguilingly played by John David Washington,
former football star and son of Denzel, Stallworth gets a taste of the racist hurdles
ahead of him when he begins a humiliating stint in the records department.
But it is when he moves into undercover
work that the pace – and the satire – pick up. His first assignment is at a
meeting addressed by Black Panther Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael)
where he meets and falls for prickly activist Patrice (Laura Harrier), a
lookalike Angela Davis.
Throughout the movie, Stallworth’s personal
identity, as a proud but put-upon black man living in a white man’s society,
conflicts with his professional mission as a cop.
This issue comes centre stage when he
responds to a Ku Klux Klan ad in the local newspaper asking for more members.
Stallworth, who has some expertise in modulating his voice to talk “the king’s
English”, duly phones up the Klan pretending to be a white racist. The
infiltration exercise is duly carried out in the flesh by a white (Jewish)
policeman, Flip (Adam Driver), who has almost as many issues about his
(concealed) origins as Stallworth.
This is a movie in which serious and funny
bounce off each other like the action you get in a pinball machine. Lee has a
lot of fun with the white right, exposing it as comically idiotic but never
forgetting that it is also extremely dangerous. The grand wizard of the KKK,
David Duke (Topher Grace) is played like smooth-talking bureaucrat, while the
most vicious extremist, Felix (Jasper Paakkonen), comes closest to instilling a
real sense of fear.
Lee is not afraid to enrich the story with
documentary and movie history. The former offers a chilling climax to the film
with scenes from last year’s disgraceful “unite-the-right” demonstration in
Charlottesville (partly defended by Trump) in which a woman is run over and
killed by a racist, while scenes from Birth
of a Nation and Gone with the Wind
cleverly punctuate the action.
And there is a particularly impressive
piece of cross-cutting between an old black activist addressing his young
audience (black power) and a creepy sub-Masonic ceremony by the KKK (white
power).
Perhaps, after all, the very richness of
Lee’s cinematic armoury does lead to some unevenness of presentation, but this
doesn’t hurt the film that positively bursts out of any potential straitjacket.
And one thing is for sure, most of Lee’s salvoes explode precisely on the Trumpian
jaw.
BlacKkKlansman opens in Durban on September 7, 2018. – Patrick Compton
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