Spike Lee’s latest recounts officer’s KKK infiltration, with humour and tears.
Spike Lee saves his biggest punch for the finale of BlacKkKlansman. It’s not exactly a twist ending; more of a thought-provoking coda that left the audience at the world première in Cannes speechless, rocked back in their seats, questioning their reactions to what they’d just seen and to the world that exists outside the cinema. It is not easy to forget. But, annoying though this may be, I won’t say any more about it here.
BlacKkKlansman — a title guaranteed to drive writers and copy editors mad like nothing since Inglourious Basterds, is based on a true story, though you’d be forgiven for thinking Lee and his three co-writers made it up after smoking something. Here’s how it went down.
In 1979, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington in the film) became one of the first black police officers in the force in Colorado Springs, Colo. When he noticed an ad for the Ku Klux Klan in the local paper, he called on a whim — and joined the group. He spouted a ridiculous list of derogatory terms into the phone line; Walter (Ryan Eggold) liked what he heard and wanted to meet.
That part was clearly going to be a problem, so Ron enlisted fellow cop Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) — a Jew, as it happens — to be the white face of Ron Stallworth. There’s a parallel here to the recent Sorry To Bother You, in which a black telemarketer uses his “white voice” to increase his success over the phone except, to be clear — true story this time.
Ron and Flip — and, by extension, the movie and we in the audience — make great sport of the KKK. When Ron calls David Duke to inquire about why his membership card is taking so long to arrive, he impulsively asks the Grand Wizard whether he ever worries about a black man pretending to be white on the phone. Duke doesn’t use the term black-dar, but he says he can just tell. Chuckles all around.
Of course, racism is no laughing matter, and Lee occasionally pulls back on the yoke of comedy to remind us of that. Flip is confronted with his own identity as a Jew — “I never thought much about it and now I’m thinking about it all the time,” he muses. And both cops are put in real danger from their scheme, not least when Klansman Ivanhoe — a real mouth-breather, perfectly portrayed by I, Tonya’s Paul Walter Hauser — smells a rat.
Lee has an agenda here, which sometimes fights with his storytelling instincts. The scene where Harry Belafonte shows up recounting the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, while in another location the local KKK group is laughing uproariously at a private screening of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, is a little too on the nose.
But the point is still valid. Things were bad a hundred years ago, and they’re still bad today, in spite of the Ron Stall worths and Flip Zimmermans of the world. You’ll laugh at the antics of BlacKkKlansman, but you may find yourself in tears, or shaking in anger, on the way out. ★★★★
BlacKkKlansman opens across Canada on Aug. 10.