RETURN TO VIETNAM
Director Spike Lee’s compelling war odyssey is both entertaining and enlightening
If you Google “best Vietnam War movies,” the posters show a lot of tired and angry white faces looking back at you. There’s Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers. Willem Dafoe in Platoon. Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July. Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter. Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War. And on back to John Wayne in The Green Berets.
The picture in country was rather different. Beginning in 1965, a surge in the draft resulted in a quarter million new U.S. soldiers. Forty-one per cent were Black, compared to just 11 per cent of the U.S. population. After the war, Blacks were twice as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Enter Spike Lee, whose last feature, 2018’s Blackkklansman, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and was arguably robbed of another for best picture by the much safer race-relations movie Green Book. He also directed 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna, a Second World War movie that opens with a Black veteran watching Wayne in The Longest Day and talking back to the TV: “Pilgrim, we fought for this country, too.”
So on the one hand Lee’s Vietnam War flick Da 5 Bloods represents a way of redressing an imbalance in the narrative of that conflict. (1995 saw a couple of other examples: the Vietnam vet crime drama Dead Presidents from the Hughes brothers, and Preston A. Whitmore II’S The Walking Dead, about a POW rescue mission.)
But it would be a mistake to look at this film as merely a didactic screed. Da 5 Bloods is on its surface an entertaining action movie, about a quartet of veterans — Delroy Lindo as Paul; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Melvin; Clarke Peters as Otis; and Norm Lewis as Eddie — who return to Saigon to find the remains of their fallen commander, and also to recover a huge trunk full of gold, found and buried when they were last there in 1971. They’re joined by David (Jonathan Majors), Paul’s adult son.
The film began with a 2013 screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, called The Last Tour, which was almost shot by Oliver Stone. When that fell through, Lee got hold of it and did a rewrite with Blackkklansman co-writer Kevin Willmott, in the process flipping the characters’ race.
So it’s a guarantee that in the original screenplay the soldiers don’t hear about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while on patrol, and they don’t have to be talked down by their commander (Chadwick Boseman), from using their weapons to exact revenge on their white
brothers-in-arms. It’s also a safe bet that no one references that messianic leader as: “He was our Malcolm and our Martin.”
But the movie is richer for all of this.
Lee makes some great choices in shooting this story. Scenes during the war are shot in narrow, grainy footage, replicating the look of 16 mm film, which is how many people back home saw the war on their television sets. When the action changes to the present day the screen goes wide, the picture sharp.
But what doesn’t change is the actors playing the four soldiers. Though all are in their 50s and 60s, they do double duty as their younger selves, without the benefit of makeup, digital de-aging or look-alike younger actors.
It’s a risky move, but it works on a number of levels. For one thing, we don’t have to remember who’s who in the flashbacks, which was a big problem with last year’s The Last Full Measure. Metaphorically, it suggests that they are stuck in the past. (At least one of the four has PTSD, while another is addicted to painkillers.) And special effects are not Da 5 Bloods’ strong suit; one scene of a landmine victim looks particularly unconvincing.
Regardless, the story is solid and compelling. The veterans arrive in a Saigon unrecognizable from the one they left decades earlier — one of them looks at all the fast-food joints and remarks that all they needed to do was let Colonel Sanders fight the war for them. After a night at the Apocalypse Now bar — a real place, by the way — they set off upriver with their guide Vinh (Johnny Nguyen) as the soundtrack obliges with Ride of the Valkyries.
It’s a classic men-on-a-mission narrative, enlivened with surprises in both casting — Jean Reno plays a French mercenary who’s going to help them get the gold out of the country — and in character development, as when we learn early on that Paul is a Maga-hat-wearing Trump supporter who seems to have signed up for the president’s anti-immigrant platform. And you can hear Lee needling the right wing when Paul, accused of being a baby-killer, responds with: “There were atrocities on both sides.”
The film is beautifully shot — it’s a shame it had to skip a planned première at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where
Lee was also supposed to be heading up the jury. And it’s equally wonderful to listen to, with a powerful, sweeping score by Lee regular Terence Blanchard, and musical choices that include a haunting, a cappella version of Marvin Gaye’s antiwar ballad What’s Going On.
Lee clearly has an agenda, and one that dovetails nicely with the anti-racism protests taking place around the globe right now. But he also knows how to craft quality entertainment.
So come for the Black history and stay for the story, or vice versa. Either way, it’s an incredible odyssey.
When Spike Lee phoned in for an interview late last week, New York was still in the throes of demonstrations against police brutality, a lockdown brought on by COVID -19 and the civic unrest and economic crisis that have ensued. But Lee, who was calling from his home on the Upper East Side, was in a surprisingly exuberant mood. “Wednesday was the first day nobody died from corona,” he said, citing data regarding confirmed deaths published by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. What’s more, he had taken a bike ride to mayoral residence Gracie Mansion a few days earlier that considerably raised his spirits.
“I had a mask on, trying to be incog-negro,” he recalls with a wry laugh. “And it was a great sight for my sore eyes to see my fellow New Yorkers — white, brown, red and Black — unified and speaking up against the powers that be.”
He was even more heartened by what he saw on CNN all week. “It happened all across the United States of America, not just New York,” he says excitedly. “haven’t seen this since I was a kid growing up in the ’60s.”
Having a conversation with Lee, who turned 63 in March, is akin to a dance: He is as sharply observant and coruscatingly critical as the films he’s been making since his groundbreaking debut in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It. But, like most of his movies, he possesses an underlying current of humour that can instantly disarm even his harshest detractors. His new movie, Da 5 Bloods, which is streaming on Netflix, exemplifies what makes him so distinctive as a director: He’s one of a handful of filmmakers who has refined an instantly recognizable cinematic language.
Lee has also been fearless about making polemical work, and speaking out about politics offscreen, regardless of the blowback he might receive in Hollywood or from his audience.
Given the huge turnouts at the nationwide demonstrations in recent weeks, is he optimistic that systemic change is at hand?
The answer, he says, is all about follow-through. “Let’s not get (ahead of) ourselves,” he warns. “Let’s see what’s happened when we wake up on Nov. 4. Because regardless of what’s happening now, if Agent Orange gets re-elected, then it’s been in vain.”
Agent Orange, as Lee’s fans know, is the filmmaker’s preferred name for President Donald Trump. It’s also a deadly chemical that was used as an herbicide and defoliant in Vietnam, where Da 5 Bloods takes place. The movie stars Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Clarke Peters and Norm Lewis as veterans who return to the country to recover the remains of their fallen squad leader (played in flashbacks by Chadwick Boseman). Along the way, they embark on a scheme reminiscent of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of Lee’s all-time favourites.
Although it obeys the conventions of war films and caper flicks, Da 5 Bloods also recognizes the disproportionate sacrifice of Black soldiers in Vietnam, who were drafted, sent to the front lines, killed and court-martialed far more often than their white peers. Lee, who with Kevin Willmott retooled Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo’s script that had originally been about white characters, first heard about the project in 2017 as he was preparing to direct Blackkklansman. Although he couldn’t have known then that the themes of Da 5 Bloods would be so germane in 2020, he says, “It doesn’t take a great leap to make a correlation between what happened to Black and brown boys in Vietnam and what’s happened to Black and brown communities with corona.”
Far from being despondent about coronavirus and political unrest, Lee says, he feels he was “built for this.”
Since New York went into shutdown, he has been isolating at home with his wife, Tonya, their grown children, Satchel and Jackson, and their Yorkshire terrier, Ginger. “The family motto: Be safe and one day at a time.”
When the video emerged of George Floyd dying under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Lee responded days later with a breathtaking 94-second short film called 3 Brothers — Radio Raheem, Eric Garner and George Floyd, in which he intercut the deaths of Garner and Floyd with footage from the 1989 film Do the Right Thing, in which Radio Raheem, played by Bill Nunn, dies while in a police chokehold.
Does Lee feel compelled to make a particular movie in light of these extraordinary times? “No,” he says flatly, although he suggests he might be inspired to make another short film.
“As I’ve got older and more mature, I can understand that every artist has their own path,” he says. “And there are some artists — and I’m not making any judgments — they think that their gift to God is their talent and to entertain people, and they make a conscious decision to leave politics out of it. And that’s their choice.
“But I do think that history has showed us that when times have been rough, they’ve produced some of the greatest music, movies, plays and whatnot from artists who feel that it’s their duty to comment or hold up a window to the evil that’s going on.”
The Washington Post