Vintage Spike Lee at the forefront of Da 5 Bloods
Da 5 Bloods (16+, 154 mins) Directed by Spike Lee Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Did Spike Lee know just how eerily 2020 was going to resemble 1968 when he started planning Da5 Bloods, his latest assault on American revisionism and Hollywood’s whitewashing of history?
Yeah, probably. Lee has been reporting back from the frontlines of America’s ongoing war with the truth for 40 years now.
As long as he-who-Lee-will-notname is in the White House, Da5 Bloods was always going to arrive in a state of perfect attunement to the zeitgeist. Just as Lee has pretty much always managed. The film lays out a story that perfectly echoes and then explicitly mocks any number of Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris testosterone-fests of the 1980s.
Four Vietnam veterans meet in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. They are returning to the scene of a battle that defined them all, to find and retrieve the body of their beloved squad leader, Stormin’ Norman. And, just maybe, find the case of gold bars they buried nearby.
The men disagree on what they will do with the gold if they find it. Some want to keep it for themselves and their fellow soldiers, as the compensation their government never paid.
Others want to put the wealth to work in black communities, funding clinics and scholarships that could lift families and neighbourhoods out of many kinds of poverty.
What they do agree on, is that their collective history was hell. In scene after scene of flashbacks, Lee puts us right in the thick of firefights, helicopter crashes, brutal ambushes, and moments of such crazy, stark terror, he lifts this Bloods straight to the top level of war movies that I actually trust are telling it like it was.
But Lee has a lot more than an adventure on his mind. Every frame of this film is informed by his absolute rejection of the usual movie tropes of race and of how black lives play out on screen.
These men josh and heckle each other with a completely believable warmth, familiarity and affection. But beneath it, especially in the character of Paul, who saw Norman die and who has never let go, we see glimpses of the fear and rage that carried them through the war.
Played by veteran Delroy Lindo (Clockers), Paul is a brilliant, often disturbing piece of work. If Lindo doesn’t pick up at least one nomination for what he achieves here, then the Academy’s reputation for routinely snubbing Spike Lee will be intact.
With Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, 25th Hour, Inside Man, and Summer of Sam all on his CV, Lee still only received his first Best Picture and Best Director Oscar nominations in 2018, for BlackKkKlansman. Then he lost out on the main prize to the drivel of Green Book.
Lee’s decision to have the men play themselves, even in flashback, is dislocating at first.
But I came to like it as a creative choice. Memory is an interpretation, changed by age. Watching these ageing men respond to and remember their battles as their present-day selves, without recasting or de-ageing, packed a punch a less audacious director couldn’t have swung.
Da 5 Bloods is vintage Spike Lee. Lee still has the moves, the rage, the humour and the urgency he brought to his movies 40 years ago.
Maybe complacency is a luxury reserved for the pale, male majority of film-makers. All I know is there isn’t an iota of complacency anywhere in Lee’s catalogue yet.
Da 5 Bloods is now streaming on Netflix.