I saw BlacKkKlansman and was disappointed
Sep. 4th, 2018 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexBlacKkKlansman (that capitalization gets me every time - I'm copying from IMDB) is the latest Spike Lee effort. Originally a Jordan Peele vehicle, he pulled in Lee to direct a script with four writers (never a good sign, imo) based on a book by the titular black Klansman, Ron Stallworth. I've not read the book, but I've read and listened to interviews with Stallworth and I feel like somehow with the number of hands this story passed through, something crucial got lost. 2/5 stars for reasons I'll have to talk about behind spoiler cuts.
The basic story is that Stallworth, the first black policeman in very white Colorado Springs, takes the initiative to respond by phone to an ad placed by the KKK. Using his 'white' voice he gets himself invited and begins a dialog with the Klansmen that will eventually reach David Duke, then the Grand Wizard. Since Stallworth is black, he needs a body double to attend the in-person meetings. Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver) fills in, with some hiccups.
There's a plot, of sorts, but hardly worth discussing. What matters more, and where the film fails badly, is in the characters. Unfortunately, to do this I'd have to spoiler so I'll put it behind a cut.
Given that we know what the characters are going to do, the key question is why do they do what they do and what effect does it have? You know that two detectives in a small town aren't going to have a major impact on Klan activities, so what difference does all this make?
First, you'd expect that there should be some impact on the town. Unfortunately, the town more or less doesn't appear in the film. There are Klansmen, who we presume are town residents, and there's a Black Student Union that is the focus of both black protest and Klan targeting. We never get a sense for how the townsfolk feel about the Klan being active in their town, burning crosses, setting off bombs, etc.
There's an overtly racist police officer who makes a habit of messing with black people: bogus traffic stops, bullshit arrests, and for fun, sexual assault. How do people in town feel about that? When he eventually goes down for at least one of these crimes, how does the town react?
More disappointing to me is that the main characters of the film have no depth. Stallworth sets out to be the "Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs police department" - why? At one point in the film he says that he always wanted to be a police officer. OK, why did he always want that? We get nothing real of his background, his upbringing. Why Colorado Springs and not virtually any other town in the US? Did he set out to be the first? What would drive a black officer to want to be alone in a department rather that working in a department where other black officers had already broken barriers? Having watched this film I literally cannot tell you anything about Stallworth's motivations, other than he appears to enjoy tweaking the noses of racists.
The movie's ending here really hurts as well. Lee has always had a problem with his endings and this movie is no exception. At the end of this movie, we get a wholly gratuitous scene of the police officers laughing at David Duke having been duped by their body double play. Then we cut to scenes from the past couple years of Nazis marching in Charlottesville, of (the real) David Duke speaking, of Heather Heyer being murdered and responses to that including Trump asserting that Nazis are "fine people". What's the point of that? If Lee believed the movie didn't convey how dangerous the Klan was then fix the body of the movie. If Lee believed that we needed reminders of how bad things are then he totally misunderstood who would go see this movie.
I was also annoyed by the way Zimmerman was played. A fair bit is made in the movie of his "being Jewish" and trying to convince skeptical Klan that he's not. At one point there's a scene between him and Stallworth where the black officer asks the Jewish officer if he doesn't feel like he has skin in this game. Zimmerman makes some hand-wave about not being "raised Jewish". And then it's dropped. The script has Zimmerman saying some aggressively racist and antisemitic things to convince the Klan of his authenticity. How does he feel about that? Zimmerman comes across as a paper cut-out with "Jewish" pasted on it, not as someone who might have real feelings about his relationship to a cultural and religious heritage, particularly when confronted with people who would like to murder him and his whole family.
With the two lead characters having no emotional depth, it's impossible for me to latch onto anything in this movie. Lee almost seems to be aware of this problem, putting in an extended scene of Harry Belafonte telling the black students a first-hand experience of a town brutally torturing and lynching a young black man. Belafonte's voice and story are mesmerizing but in the end it's problematic that a story about people who don't even appear in the film has more impact than the entire rest of the two hours.
The basic story is that Stallworth, the first black policeman in very white Colorado Springs, takes the initiative to respond by phone to an ad placed by the KKK. Using his 'white' voice he gets himself invited and begins a dialog with the Klansmen that will eventually reach David Duke, then the Grand Wizard. Since Stallworth is black, he needs a body double to attend the in-person meetings. Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver) fills in, with some hiccups.
There's a plot, of sorts, but hardly worth discussing. What matters more, and where the film fails badly, is in the characters. Unfortunately, to do this I'd have to spoiler so I'll put it behind a cut.
Given that we know what the characters are going to do, the key question is why do they do what they do and what effect does it have? You know that two detectives in a small town aren't going to have a major impact on Klan activities, so what difference does all this make?
First, you'd expect that there should be some impact on the town. Unfortunately, the town more or less doesn't appear in the film. There are Klansmen, who we presume are town residents, and there's a Black Student Union that is the focus of both black protest and Klan targeting. We never get a sense for how the townsfolk feel about the Klan being active in their town, burning crosses, setting off bombs, etc.
There's an overtly racist police officer who makes a habit of messing with black people: bogus traffic stops, bullshit arrests, and for fun, sexual assault. How do people in town feel about that? When he eventually goes down for at least one of these crimes, how does the town react?
More disappointing to me is that the main characters of the film have no depth. Stallworth sets out to be the "Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs police department" - why? At one point in the film he says that he always wanted to be a police officer. OK, why did he always want that? We get nothing real of his background, his upbringing. Why Colorado Springs and not virtually any other town in the US? Did he set out to be the first? What would drive a black officer to want to be alone in a department rather that working in a department where other black officers had already broken barriers? Having watched this film I literally cannot tell you anything about Stallworth's motivations, other than he appears to enjoy tweaking the noses of racists.
The movie's ending here really hurts as well. Lee has always had a problem with his endings and this movie is no exception. At the end of this movie, we get a wholly gratuitous scene of the police officers laughing at David Duke having been duped by their body double play. Then we cut to scenes from the past couple years of Nazis marching in Charlottesville, of (the real) David Duke speaking, of Heather Heyer being murdered and responses to that including Trump asserting that Nazis are "fine people". What's the point of that? If Lee believed the movie didn't convey how dangerous the Klan was then fix the body of the movie. If Lee believed that we needed reminders of how bad things are then he totally misunderstood who would go see this movie.
I was also annoyed by the way Zimmerman was played. A fair bit is made in the movie of his "being Jewish" and trying to convince skeptical Klan that he's not. At one point there's a scene between him and Stallworth where the black officer asks the Jewish officer if he doesn't feel like he has skin in this game. Zimmerman makes some hand-wave about not being "raised Jewish". And then it's dropped. The script has Zimmerman saying some aggressively racist and antisemitic things to convince the Klan of his authenticity. How does he feel about that? Zimmerman comes across as a paper cut-out with "Jewish" pasted on it, not as someone who might have real feelings about his relationship to a cultural and religious heritage, particularly when confronted with people who would like to murder him and his whole family.
With the two lead characters having no emotional depth, it's impossible for me to latch onto anything in this movie. Lee almost seems to be aware of this problem, putting in an extended scene of Harry Belafonte telling the black students a first-hand experience of a town brutally torturing and lynching a young black man. Belafonte's voice and story are mesmerizing but in the end it's problematic that a story about people who don't even appear in the film has more impact than the entire rest of the two hours.
