Vintage Spike Lee at the forefront of Da 5 Bloods
Ayoung family in modernday Dublin are between houses. They had lived in their last rental for seven good years, making and raising their four terrific kids.
But now the owner has sold the house from under them and the Davis-Bradys are searching for a new place to call home.
Dublin was a property speculator’s dream until the Global Financial Crisis hit, after which a lot of the housing stock was concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of people.
As in New Zealand, within a mismanaged decade, those ‘‘market forces’’ we are all required to genuflect to had put a decent house out of the reach of many decent people.
Rosie takes place over a handful of days and nights.
Often, the action is confined to the family car, as mother Rosie phones and door-knocks around the over-booked, short-term accommodation providers.
Her partner and the kids’ dad John works all the overtime he can
DGraeme Tuckett
Graeme Tuckett
id 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. get at work and spends his lunch breaks applying for long-term rentals.
And if any of the above sounds grim, bleak, or depressing, then put that thought out of your head immediately. Rosie is a five-star treat.
First up, there’s a script from Roddy Doyle. Doyle has been one of
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
Dublin’s fondest diarists for decades, with his Barrytown Trilogy of The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van all making it very successfully from the page to the screen.
Doyle knows the rhythms of speech and life in his hometown inside and out.
He brings an unfakeable 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 authenticity, warmth and wit to the family’s life that is a joy to spend time with, even as our hearts break for their predicament.
Then, there’s Sarah Greene as Rosie.
Greene isn’t a household name. If you recognise her at all, it’ll probably be for her work in the TV series Ransom. 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.
But here, as the always in motion, always attentive, justgetting-through-each-day young mother, Greene absolutely shines.
In a thousand tiny moments, movements and expressions, Greene brings this woman to life and wins us over for all time.
Given the ages of the actors playing the children, I can only guess that a lot of what we are watching is being improvised on the spot.
It is an astonishing, gorgeous and utterly selfless piece of work.
With Greene’s performance and Doyle’s script to work with, director Paddy Breathnach keeps the film percolating and believable at every turn. Without the tacked on contrivance of a ‘‘happy end’’, Breathnach still takes us out on a moment of dignity and optimism that these people will prevail.
Breathnach usually works in the crime/comedy genre that Ireland and the UK have made their own.
His I Went Down (1997) is a filthy-minded gem of a thing you’ll adore if you can find it.
By bringing his comedy chops to this downbeat tale, Breathnach sidesteps the anger and angst the film could so easily have slid into, and focuses on the love that binds these people, not the circumstances that assail them.
Comparisons to Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake are probably valid, but I preferred Rosie.
With the possibility of no International Film Festival in our cinemas this year, treat yourself to Rosie. You won’t regret it.
Rosie is screening now in select cinemas.
Asia, Krook (whose last doco, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, looked at DJ Steve Aoki) aims to assure us that while stunning advances are constantly being made, we are still some way off creating machines that are truly intelligent.
‘‘What can robots do well today? Wander around and clean up the floor,’’ muses one observer.
Fans of films like Cherry 2000, Blade Runner and Her will delight in some of the topics covered here, while the ever-increasing debate over the rise of self-driving vehicles is well fleshed and thrashed out, including the suggestion that, one day, humans might be banned from driving in certain areas.
Deep fakes and Facebook’s algorithms are explained, the case for and against autonomous warfare is presented and there’s a timely look at how virtual holidays, inspired by your own dreams, might work.
Animated sequences break up the procession of talking heads, although most of those are wellchosen anyway, offering up witty and intelligent observations like: ‘‘If we’re going to build things, we’ve got to instil them with our values.
‘‘Yes, that means, if they take over, it’s going to be horrible, but that is the truth with raising kids, too.’’
If you take anything away from Machine, it should be that empathy is what will save the world.
You should also take from it that the future shouldn’t be something ‘‘we have to adapt to’’, it should be the product of the decisions we are making today.
Machine is now screening in select cinemas.