SPIKE LOSES THE PLOT...
Spike Lee’s tale of racism in 1970s America should be a cracking movie. What a pity he’s transformed it into a right-on rant about Donald Trump
BlacKKKlansman, the new spike lee film, is ostensibly about the efforts of an undercover africanamerican colorado police officer to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in the late seventies.
In reality, it is a two-hour-and-15-minute attack on Donald Trump and the supposed racism of those who voted for him.
It opens with a foul-mouthed tirade by alec Baldwin, playing a southern segregationist named Dr Kennebrew Beauregard, and closes with documentary footage of a car being driven into a crowd of black protesters at last year’s far-Right rally in charlottesville, Virginia.
In between, we’re treated to scenes from D.W. Griffith’s notoriously bigoted 1915 film The Birth Of a nation and presented with a heart-rending tale by elderly Jerome Turner (Harry Belafonte, no less) about a lynching he saw as a boy.
The message is clear — america is a racist country and always has been, africanamericans are forever doomed to be an oppressed minority and the current President is a white supremacist.
This hectoring tone is a pity because lee has produced some decent films such as Inside man and summer Of sam. In BlacKkKlansman, there’s a damning portrait of Klan Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), a deeply unpleasant man depicted as trying to win power via an electoral strategy of whipping up anger over immigration.
When the central character expresses scepticism that someone repugnant like Duke could reach the White House, his boss says: ‘Why don’t you wake up?’
The comparison with Trump is hardly subtle, but is it fair?
Indeed, there is so much to question in this message that it’s hard to know where to start. Was Trump’s victory merely a kind of ‘whitelash’ against the presidency of Barack Obama? Research shows Trump got a
smaller share of the white vote than 2012 Republican nominee mitt Romney and won because more Hispanics and asians voted for him than Romney. He also got more black votes than any Republican since 2004. It is also wrong to claim african-americans will always be second-class citizens. a recent report for the american Enterprise Institute, a conservative think- tank, suggests a majority of black men (57 per cent) now belong to the middle or upper-middle- class, up from 38 per cent in 1960.
During the same period, it reported that the number of black men living in poverty fell from 41 per cent to 18 per cent. america is still the land of opportunity.
But it isn’t just the relentless, one- dimensional identity politics of BlacKkKlansman that is such a borefest. Tragically, this is a missed opportunity. By trying to stir audiences into righteous indignation about race, spike lee fails to include elements that might make his film entertaining — such as plot, character development, romance, action and suspense.
The title character, Ron stallworth, is played by John David Washington, son of Denzel, who lacks the charisma and screen presence of his father. That would not matter so much if the writers had fleshed out his
character with some nuance and depth, but we’re never told why an incipient black radical, with an abiding hatred of the Klan, has joined the police.
that’s an odd omission, given that Lee has so many characters complain that American police officers routinely shoot dead innocent young black men.
As with all the other politically correct canards repeated ad infinitum, that’s utter nonsense. A 2016 study by an AfricanAmerican Harvard professor found black men are no more likely to be the victims of officerinvolved shootings than whites.
BlacKkKlansman is based on a true story. stallworth contacts local Klansmen by phone and gets white officer flip Zimmerman (Adam driver) to impersonate him in meetings. this provides Lee with chances to inject excitement by having Klansmen almost stumble across the truth about stallworth and Zimmerman. But Lee flunks every opportunity and the film is about as suspenseful as a broken clothes line.
Zimmerman, like stallworth, is a woefully underwritten character. you get no sense of what HE’s issues he has to resolve.
an assimilated Jew and stallworth admonishes him for being insufficiently race- conscious. doesn’t he realise they’re united in a struggle against a common enemy?
But this plot strand doesn’t go anywhere. Has Zimmerman’s exposure to the Klan radicalised him and turned him into a militant, unassimilated Jew? We’re simply not told.
Needless to say, the film has been showered with praise by right- on commentators. No doubt it will end up festooned with awards, including an Oscar for Best Picture.
Normally that wouldn’t matter and BlacKkKlansman could be treated as yet another Hollywood attack on trump. But from someone as respected as spike Lee, his provocative treatment of race issues risks stirring up unrest.
in one particularly egregious scene, we’re shown Black Panthers founder stokely Carmichael aka Kwame ture (Corey Hawkins) speaking to an enraptured black audience.
He claims that white Americans are planning to kill them and advises them to arm themselves in preparation for the coming race war.
Watching this in dismay, i was reminded of the words of the great dr Martin Luther King: ‘fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos . . . can reap nothing but grief.’
Amen, doctor King.