Please enjoy this review of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman by our newest guest author, Tenzytile. – Ed
BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s most accessible and broadly enjoyable film in a dozen years, and it also manages to be a film that couldn’t have come from anyone else; a film that expresses Lee’s fascinations in theme and style while resisting his characteristic messiness that can alienate or frustrate some audiences. It’s been touted as a return to form, but in truth Lee had both never lost his excellence as a filmmaker, and also never had a form quite like this one. BlacKkKlansman is the film that much of Lee’s film career points towards and yet it seemed uncertain despite its eventuality because of his resistance to conventional filmmaking.
The film opens not with its plot, but with a wonderful diptych of confrontational material that decries America’s racist film heritage, introduces white supremacist rhetoric, and builds the film’s unique seriocomic tone by means of a rambunctious performance from Alec Baldwin that’s both terrifying and funny. It’s an overture, similar to and possibly inspired by Lina Wermuller’s Seven Beauties, of which Lee is a fan; it’s an opening that lays artistic intention on the table in a disarming and intriguing way that requires an explanation–an elaboration. The following plot is that.
In 1972, Ron Stallworth (Washington), a young black man, is hired into the Colorado Springs police force. It’s clear that he is given the job as a result of affirmative action and is given thankless work in records, treated with cynicism and open discrimination. As a unique asset (the only black officer in the city), he proposes undercover work, and gets it, only to be used to gauge a speech by a civil rights leader put on by the black student union of Colorado University. During that evening, Stallworth begins a friendly relationship with the head of that student union, Patrice (Harrier).
It’s after having been used as a tool against his own race that Stallworth, on a whim, phones the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan and supposing a white voice, asks to join. Stallworth is given permission to move ahead, and another detective, Flip Zimmerman (Driver) is assigned to play Ron Stallworth, KKK applicant, in the flesh while Ron Stallworth, black detective, continues his work over the phone, eventually achieving correspondence with grand dragon David Duke (Grace). The film then moves forward in a procedural manner, with Detectives Zimmerman and Stallworth infiltrating the Klan and working to intercept planned hate crimes. Meanwhile Stallworth’s relationship with Patrice challenges his identity as a black man and police officer both through discourse and the dramatic fact that they met under false pretences.
Lee does not avoid any of the absurdity of the premise, and his mastery of tonal contrast, which may be his most distinctive trait as a director, is fully on display. It is a film about horrific racism, but it is also openly funny, and transitioning between the two is sometimes achieved naturally in seconds, effectively building a thriller-like atmosphere of shock and relief. Still, it resists farce, and with a couple of exceptions (a dopey, guffawing Klan member and a necessary but stock racist police officer) keeps from relying on caricature to create its discomfort and humor. It’s a cousin of both Lee’s outrageous, overflowing satire of cultural pain (Bamboozled, Chi-Raq) and the more focused, personal films with which Lee built his reputation as a world-class director (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X).
This atmosphere of terror and irony, looseness and modulation, is also intense on the cast, which performs with a real confidence. John David Washington in the lead personifies Stallworth with a reserved curiosity, strength, and tenderness. He’s immediately endearing while leaving room for growth, and plays off many wildly peculiar characters and circumstances in a compelling and convincing way. Even more impressive is Adam Driver in a role that could have appeared underwritten or thankless (we know almost nothing of Flip’s personal life, he spends far more of his screen time performing as white Stallworth), who, in what’s becoming a career defining characteristic, plays down his unique look and voice, resulting in a kind of quiet naturalism. How believably Flip adopts a racist personality is worrying as the film progresses, but there’s a beautiful scene before the third act in which he, in his friendly, resigned way, mentions to Detective Stallworth how he’s reexamined his own non-identifying Jewish heritage since they’ve been on the case. It’s a scene as effective as any of the film’s more intense passages, as it earnestly lays out the effects of discrimination on personal identity, and it happens to a character whose life we haven’t really accessed until that point.
Lee’s visual direction does take a bit of a back seat for all of his efforts in navigating the tricky, performance-heavy drama and tonal high-wire-walking of the story itself. It’s not bad work; in fact it is much better than the Hollywood average. Lee is comfortable to let scenes play out in medium-wides, sparing close-ups for when they’re necessary, and he definitely knows when to intensify passages with tighter editing and purposeful camera movement. It’s mostly a sturdy work of classical direction, but the thing is Lee has never been much of a workmanlike director. Even Malcolm X, what might be considered his most pious of films, has a colourful zoot suit dance number in the first act–and I love it for that. BlacKkKlansman has its occasional moments of visual idiosyncrasy, too: the previously mentioned civil rights speech in the first act is presented with a visual idealism reminiscent of silent film, in which the speech is interspersed with the faces of its listeners, which dissolve in and out over black. Another sequence has Detective Stallworth and Patrice discussing blaxploitation, and the posters of the films mentioned fill the screen. Neither of these sequences are bothersome on their own, and wouldn’t seem out of place in the majority of Lee’s other work, but they stand out amongst the many modestly presented conversations in cramped rooms and over phone lines that make up the majority of the film.
There is one sequence, or a pair of sequences, rather, that comes to mind in which Lee’s visual stylings really harmonize. It’s not one of the story’s many important beats, but something tricky and a little tangential, a part of the story that could use some attention and finesse in order to justify its inclusion. After the speech for the CSU, Detective Stallworth goes to meet Patrice at a bar, and she arrives late and disturbed. In short flashback we’re shown how Patrice and the other people responsible for the speech were pulled over by the police, intimidated, and Patrice sexually assaulted by the officer. It’s a stark sequence of bodies crowded around a vehicle, illuminated in the night; and it’s cut off as soon as it makes its point, dramatically, socially, and psychologically. The tremendous thing is that Lee then transitions back to the bar, wherein Stallworth and Patrice enter a crowded back room and dance to “It’s Too Late to Turn Back Now”, one of the great, uplifting dance tracks of its era. It’s a swirl of moving feet, happy faces and warm light; a sequence in charge of its own motion, tightly shot and rhythmically edited. The rest of the film only has two scenes that are directly about black America, and both are civil rights speeches earnestly performed–this passage lays out the experience of persecution and respite, exclusion and togetherness, in purely visceral and visual strokes; experiential instead of didactic.
How Lee closes out his film is similarly tricky and unique, bouncing between the obligatory triumph of film narrative and the deflating reality of racism’s resilience. The plot coalesces in a messy and satisfying last-act chase for a ticking bomb in which the KKK members who have become aware of the identities of both Stallworth and Flip are ironically destroyed by their own explosive. The defeat of our racist antagonists extends into the police department as well, in which the one openly bigoted police officer is arrested in a surprise sting focused on getting him to admit to groping Patrice–a sequence that feels as designed for crowd-pleasing as the action that preceded it. In briefing, instead of being celebrated and their investigations continued or further supported, Stallworth and company are glibly congratulated and disbanded in order to maintain the town’s/police department’s/country’s image. Again we transition back to dramatic gratification: Stallworth places one last call to David Duke, revealing his true identity to the entertaining confusion of the Grand Dragon. But there’s a piece of information left on the table that leads to the plot’s memorably tense and depressing finish: Ron Stallworth used his real address when applying to the KKK, and now they know he’s actually a black man. Patrice and Stallworth are hanging out at this address when there’s a knock on the door. They arm themselves and open the door to reveal an empty hallway; still armed, they travel down the hallway in one of Lee’s best implemented actor-on-dolly shots, and see cloaked KKK members burning a cross in the distance. If BlacKkKlansman’s most compelling aspect is its tonal and dramatic variance, Lee intensifies this property not just for the climax of the narrative, but in the rhythm of its denouement as well. The film ultimately lands not on defeat, exactly, but a rise in antagonism that our heroes are incapable of vanquishing.
(Alt-right rally in Charlottesville; photo not from BlacKkKlansman – Ed)
Lee pushes further even, and ends the film with a confrontational off-plot sequence that transitions from the flames of the cross and cloaked bodies that close out 1972 to documentary footage of the tiki-torch wielding white supremacists of Charlottesville 2017, and it continues on to cover the Unite the Right rally and the presidential response to the tragedies and crimes of the event, including the death of Heather Heyer. It’s a terse, direct piece of non-fiction storytelling, free of any of the relief, humour, or irony found in the rest of the film. This sobering choice to undercut the running narrative with a forceful documentary passage about recent events could feel like a rug-pull to some, and it might draw some questions about what exactly is being implied about the complicated 45 years between these two events, but the transition feels natural in its emotional and dramatic logic, and the footage is used with intention and respect. It’s tough to imagine another American film this year ending in such a risky and affecting way: BlacKkKlansman spends most of its runtime alleviating its horror and tension with moments of triumph and relief, then leaves on a note of modern horror, asking its audience to create its own resolution after leaving the theatre.
-Tenzytile