Spike Lee’s reboot of She’s Gotta Have It series vibrant but uneven.
SPIKE LEE’S SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT SERIES ON NETFLIX IS A VIBRANT IF UNEVEN WORK
At the start of Spike Lee’s 1986 breakt hrough debut, She’s Gotta Have It, the artist Nola Darling ( Tracy Camilla Johns) sits up in bed, filmed in cool black and white. “I want you to know,” she says, “the only reason I’m consenting to this is because I wish to clear my name.”
At the start of Spike Lee’s series She’s Gotta Have It, which arrived Thursday on Netflix, the artist Nola Darling ( DeWanda Wise) sits up in bed, filmed in bold colour. “I would like you to know,” she says, “the only reason I’m doing this is ’ cause folks think they know me. They think they know what I’m about, and the truth is, they don’t know me.”
It’s the same, but different: sharper, more pointed. She’s Gotta Have It is full of quotes, from literature, music, history — above all, from She’s Gotta Have It, the film. ( The song Nola, written for the film by Bill Lee, the director’s father, is not only the series’ title music but also Nola’s ringtone.)
But the 2017 model is more than the sum of its references. More expansive than interior, more defiant than dreamy, it’s a vibrant if uneven work in heated conversation with itself.
Even in a boom time for remakes and revivals, it’s unusual to see a vaunted director using TV for a doover. The original film was a low- budget, high- voltage jolt about a free spirit who refused to be judged for her sexuality. It also had its own sexual- representation prob- lems, particularly an ugly rape scene that Spike Lee has since regretted, saying, “I was immature.”
This year’s Nola is still seeing a trio of men. Jamie Overstreet ( Lyriq Bent), an i nvestment banker semiseparated from his wife, is mature but paternalistic; Greer Childs (Cleo Anthony), a model and photographer, is gorgeous but vain; Mars Blackmon ( Anthony Ramos, Hamilton), an update of Lee’s basketball- obsessed B- boy of Nike commercial fame, is childlike but childish.
But t his t i me, Nola’s work is as much the story’s throughline as her sexuality is, and the two are bound together. Art is her means of self- assertion and selfdefence. After a frightening and violent run- in with a harasser, she creates a series of street posters ( My Name Isn’t Baby Girl) inspired by the real Stop Telling Women to Smile series by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, the show’s art consultant.
Lee directs every episode, as evidenced by the directto- camera monologues and dolly shots. But he shares writing duties with a staff that includes several women, among them the playwright Lynn Nottage and Joie Lee, Lee’s sister (who also plays Nola’s mother), and t he scripts are attuned to the nuances of sexism.
The season’s five-hour run allows time to build out the supporting characters. Opal ( Ilfenesh Hadera), who in the film was an opportunistic lesbian siren, becomes a more rounded character with a romantic past, and perhaps future, with Nola.
Not every e x pansion works. A subplot about butt augmentation is a bad misfire, both scolding and flippant; a digression into Jamie’s marriage is dull. As often on Netflix, less story would have been more, and the tone swings from stagy to naturalistic to over-the-top satirical.
But Wise is a unifying presence: Her forward, fiery portrayal couldn’t be better timed for a cultural moment of women clapping back at harassment.
Brooklyn too is changed: white hipster waiters with f ulsome beards s er vi ng artisanal cocktails, black old- timers getting We Buy Homes f or Cash! f l yers jammed under their doors. Yet Spike Lee can’t help but shoot this Fort Greene as lovingly as the graffiti-painted Brooklyn of 1986.
The camera here bursts with affection: for the moment, for the past, for black culture, for Nola, for art. Spike Lee punctuates scenes with album covers of his soundtrack choices, like a vinyl enthusiast showing off his collection. There’s also grief, when the season — set in 2016 — mourns the election of Donald Trump and throws a bittersweet wake for Prince.
Like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, this series feels partly like a career retrospective. There are some of the gentrification concerns of Do the Right Thing; t he nostalgia of Crooklyn; the bludgeoning satire of Bamboozled. ( The show even works in a complaint about Denzel Washington’s not getting an Oscar for Malcolm X.)
It also shows how Spike Lee’s tool box has filled over three decades. His reprise of the climactic Thanksgiving dinner with Nola and her lovers is more playful and ambitious, as if he’s nudging his younger self across the decades: Can you do this, kid?
But the scene that sticks with me comes the episode before. Nola stands in front of one of her works, a selfportrait in multiple images, captioned with an Audre Lorde quote. “If I didn’t define myself for myself,” it says, “I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Music starts playing — Meshell Ndegeocello’s Faithful — and Nola begins ... revolving. The camera focuses on her, then her portrait, then her again. Finally, she throws her head back and wails, and words spill onto the screen — Flesh, and Trust, and the names of her lovers, and Myself.
It’s transfixing. It’s daring. It is, maybe, a bit much. But Spike Lee keeps taking in his subject, turning and turning, waiting a little longer to catch her from every angle.
THIS SERIES SHOWS HOW SPIKE LEE’S TOOL BOX HAS FILLED OVER THREE DECADES.