Boyz N The Wood
DA 5 BLOODS I Retired vets return to Vietnam to reclaim their fallen brother’s remains in Spike Lee’s latest.
When Spike Lee won a long-overdue Academy Award in 2019 he was never going to ignore the elephant in the room: “The 2020 presidential election is around the corner… Make the moral choice between love versus hate,” an impassioned Lee said. “Let’s do the right thing!” It wasn’t the first time Lee had spoken out against ‘Agent Orange’ – the filmmaker’s nickname for President Trump – and it wouldn’t be the last, for in Da 5 Bloods Lee has cast frequent collaborator Delroy Lindo as a xenophobic, MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter.
“I had major, major, major reservations about playing a Trump supporter,” Lindo tells Teasers. One of the film’s eponymous ‘Bloods’, Lindo’s Paul returns to modern day Vietnam with three surviving squad mates (played by Clarke Peters, Isiah
Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) to locate and repatriate the remains of their leader ‘Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). All four men suffer the effects of PTSD, but it’s Paul who bears the deepest scars – incapable of emotionally connecting with his son (Jonathan Majors) and haunted every night by the memory of Norm’s death.
Though the kind of role a heavyweight character actor like Lindo would typically pounce on, the opportunity was tainted by Paul’s political allegiance. “It may seem reductive that I would focus on that, but reading the script it was one of the strongest elements that jumped out at me. I didn’t want any part of it.” Lindo requested that Lee moderate Paul’s politics, but after respectful consideration Lee held firm. It was only on a second reading of the script that Lindo understood Lee’s insistence on
retaining this inflammatory character trait. “I was able to see the various other tragic components with Paul,” says Lindo. “Through that I found a way into the politics, the Trumpism.”
But Da 5 Bloods is far from Spike Lee’s Trump movie. As with all Lee’s work, it’s about the African-American experience. Here, specifically the African-American experience of Vietnam, where black men accounted for 25 per cent of Americans killed in action while making up just 13 per cent of the population – one of many facts the film unapologetically presents over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. “I know when Spike calls, it won’t be frivolous. It may not pay well – but it’ll feed your spirit!” chuckles Clarke Peters, who previously collaborated with Lee on 2012’s Red Hook Summer, and plays Otis – the Bloods’ medic.
New York-born, Peters emigrated to London in the late ’70s in the wake of the Vietnam War, which he protested. Lindo didn’t serve in Vietnam either, but had close ties that gave him an insight into Paul’s trauma. “Two of my cousins are Vietnam vets,” Lindo says. “They both suffered from PTSD, and because they’re family, they were really open with me in relaying their experiences. And then through somebody else I was then put in touch with probably six or seven other vets, all of whom I spoke with. I can’t quantify how profoundly helpful it was.”
Lindo describes Da 5 Bloods – cowritten by Lee and BlacKkKlansman’s Kevin Willmott – as “an incredibly important story”, a sentiment Peters concurs with. “We should not forget what happened in Vietnam,” says Peters. “If we don’t have a sense of history, then we will always just be reinventing the wheel. And Spike is not one to want to reinvent something, but to make sure that you remember, so that the wheel is put onto the axle, and that the whole cart moves forward.”
Also starring Jean Reno as a shady businessman the Bloods have dealings with, and Mélanie Thierry as the hands-on founder of a bomb disposal charity who crosses paths with the Bloods, the film was shot predominantly on location, with Thailand doubling for the jungles of Vietnam. It’s more expansive than almost anything Lee has made, but both Lindo and Peters saw continuity with the filmmaker they’d worked with many times over the years. “It was the same old Spike,” Peters chuckles. “You might think that because you’ve got an Academy Award, it’s going to change you. No, man. It’s his habit to work the way that he works.” Even still, filming outside urban America didn’t come naturally to Lee. “Spike said the jungle was a motherfucker. And I have to agree with him – it’s a motherfucker!” Peters laughs. “There ain’t no doubt about that. It was hot. It was humid. There were mosquitoes. It’s hell to shoot.”
‘Hell’ might describe Vietnam itself. Glimpsed in flashbacks throughout the film, the five Bloods – including Chadwick Boseman’s very much alive Norman – get involved in an explosive firefight in the basin of a verdant valley over a chest full of gold bullion. Curiously, Lee has the older Bloods play their much younger selves exactly as they look now with no prosthetics or even make-up, let alone extensive digital de-ageing. As Peters explains, this was very much deliberate.
“The thing about post-traumatic shock syndrome is that you grow old, but the situation that you’re in doesn’t. And that’s what he’s illustrating,” Peters says. “We’re all reliving everything we did on that day. Spike could have gotten younger people to [play us], but that would have missed a really important, subtle message about the remnants of war on a human being. I guess that’s why I protested against the Vietnam War, because those things don’t leave a person.” Expect Da 5 Bloods to leave a mark as well. JF
‘IF WE DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HISTORY, THEN WE WILL ALWAYS JUST BE REINVENTING THE WHEEL’ CLARKE PETERS
ETA | 12 JUNE / DA 5 BLOODS STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM NEXT MONTH.