Spike Lee responds to gang violence with the effervescent Chi-Raq.
Spike Lee responds to the almost unfathomable amount of death in Chicago — a city where the gun deaths, as he pointedly reminds us right at the beginning, now outnumber the deaths of U.S. servicemen in both their recent wars — with a movie of effervescent life. He emphasizes the tragedy of it all by reminding us of what we’re capable of — all of what we’re capable of. There is brutal, senseless violence in Chi-raq, and ecstatic sex, power point political lessons and deeply wounded psyches, furious anger at the systems we have created and nudges in the ribs at the drives that have helped create them.
This is a movie where a mother’s horrible grief at the random death of her daughter — re- enacted by an actress, Jennifer Hudson, whose own family was a victim of this very same plague — lives next to a dance number to ’ 70s slow jams played with the purpose of trying to end a sex strike. It’s a movie where a Malcolm X quote about the dangers of not reading live next to Biggie verses about the joys of excessive sex. It’s a movie where fire- breathing rhetoric about systemic racism and the cult of death that is second-amendment worship lives next to broken- hearted pleas to angry young men to smarten up already. It’s a classical play repurposed to dissect the heart of some of the biggest issues facing America today.
That play is of course Lysistrata, Aristophanes’s Greek comedy that features the women of Athens, led by the titular titan, bringing an end to war by first bringing an end to sex ( though Lee, of course, also includes direct reference to a more contemporary example: Leymah Gbowee’s sex strike to end Libera’s civil war). Here Lysistrata ( Teyonah Parris, typically brilliant) is the main squeeze of Chi- raq ( Nick Cannon, surprisingly so), the leader of one of two rival gangs helping turn Chicago into a war zone. When she witnesses a girl killed by a stray bullet, she sets to organizing the women of her city into withholding until everyone agrees to put their guns down. Their more succinct way of putting it is, “No Peace, No Pussy.”
Lee and co- writer Kevin Willmot dive into everything this might mean, from Dave Chappelle’s strip club owner lamenting the state of his empty poles to a South Side priest played by John Cusack offering a booming eulogy that doubles as a breakdown of every undercurrent that contributes to the unending violence visited on this neighbourhood every day. The broadness of their attack can sometimes lead them into formal dead-ends — like a group of horny men who are all but cartoon wolves — and it makes sure you never miss a single point, but it also makes damn sure it’s always provoking you into something, from sober consideration to angry laughter.
And that as much as anything seems to be the idea of Chi-raq: as much as it is a celebration of life, a wounded paean for what we’re losing, it just wants us to notice, to feel every bit of it as fulsomely as the movie does. The sin of the city is an uninterrupted cycle of violence; the sin of the rest of us is continuing to let it happen. ΩΩΩ ½ stars