Who Rolled this Joint?

BlackkKlansman a film by Spike Lee.  With John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace.  ***

I seem to be a minority of one, but I found this movie a major disappointment, perhaps because of my high expectations.  I’m a Spike Lee fan from way back—Do the Right Thing is an old favorite—and I was looking forward to a major new work.  I like the man’s style, and am completely in sympathy with the movie’s politics.  I’ve loved Adam Driver in the past, and was looking forward to seeing Denzel Washington’s son in his first major role.  The movies haven’t been great this summer (with a couple of exceptions), and I was ready for something good.

My biggest problem has to do with the overall concept, and the script.  (I should note that this was not an original Spike Lee project; he took it on when Jordan Peele, the director of Get Out, got too busy and couldn’t continue.)  It isn’t that I don’t take the Klan seriously, or that I don’t think racism and Nazism are a threat in this country.  By far the most powerful and horrifying part of the movie was the scenes at the end from last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, when a demonstrator drove his car through a group of people who were counter-demonstrating, killing one woman.  (On that subject, though, isn’t it a bit amateurish to need a current newsreel to make the point of your movie?  Should you need that?)

My real problem was that the movie’s conception doesn’t take the threat seriously enough.  Apparently, some years ago in Colorado Springs, a black undercover police officer named Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) made a call to the Klan and asked if he could join the organization.  At least the way it was staged in the movie, that looked like the whim of a moment, something you do on a long afternoon when you’re bored.  As in the recent Sorry to Bother You, he had a convincing “white voice” (I actually thought Washington talked pretty white all the time) and the Klansman who answered fell for it.  When Klan people wanted to meet Stallworth, he obviously couldn’t go, so he sent his fellow officer, Flip Zimmerman (Driver).  Their voices weren’t even remotely alike, but they figured it wouldn’t matter.

So it was a great joke.  Ho ho ho.  A black man joined the Klan.

Except that if you take the Klan seriously, is that the best strategy?  To play an elaborate practical joke?  Especially when it’s a joke you’re not going to be able to tell anybody, at least while it’s going on.  If you really took the Klan seriously, why wouldn’t you use a white officer in the first place, and really go undercover, and take the project seriously?

All kinds of things turned out to be needlessly dangerous.  One of the Klan members thought Zimmerman might be a Jew (which he actually was) and was on the verge of making him show his penis, to see if he was circumcised (I won’t reveal how our dynamic duo got out of that one, but I found that whole scene hokey and unbelievable).  On another occasion the Klansman looked up Stallworth’s address and found the real Ron Stallworth there; Zimmerman later claimed he wasn’t that Ron Stallworth, he lived in another town, but that sounded feeble when he said it.

The membership card was delivered to Stallworth at his own apartment; if the Klansman had checked on that he would have known something was up (and he was a humorless man with a huge arsenal in his basement.  He wasn’t someone to trifle with).  It would take too long to explain how this came about, but by the end of the movie the real Ron Stallworth supposedly engineers a photograph in which he had an arm around David Duke, while the fake Ron Stallworth was sitting at a table nearby.  That was another occasion when they were taking chances that seemed needlessly dangerous.

A whole host of other things bothered me.  The black militants seemed to be stereotypes, with their Afros and granny glasses and fists in the air.  The scenes involving them seemed stagey and unconvincing.  A dance scene at a party struck me the same way.  All the people danced so well, and practically in unison!  They were all so good looking!  (All the black people in this movie are extremely good looking.  Spike Lee hasn’t hired only good-looking people in the past.  Hell, Spike used to star in his own movies.)

I realize that the movie is intended as a commentary on our current situation (after seeing the clip of Charlottesville, we see one of Trump saying there were good people on both sides), but those references were anything but subtle, and said nothing about our current situation that hasn’t been said many times before.  I don’t see the point of unearthing this elaborate ruse from the past to say the same thing again.

The feeling of watching this movie was like watching a Michael Moore documentary, a bunch of like-minded people laughing at the other side and cheering when they look stupid.  The whole thing felt polemical.  It wasn’t a work of art.

I don’t like that I feel this way.  I’d like to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else.  But this movie doesn’t stand with Lee’s best work for me, not by a long shot.  If we want to give the man a lifetime achievement award, and a long standing ovation, let’s go ahead and do it.  But there’s no need to call a mediocre movie good.