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| photo courtesy of traileraddict.com |
BlacKkKlansman
is the latest film from director Spike Lee. Based on a true story, it follows African-American
detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), who infiltrates the local
chapter of the Ku Klux Klan over the phone. Aided by a white cop named Flip
Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who stands in for Stallworth at meetings, he conducts
an investigation which eventually allows the police to narrowly thwart a
bombing attack.
With BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee delivers a
filmmaking feat of both remarkable power and eloquent persuasion. It’s no
surprise, of course, that Lee uses Stallworth’s story to provide commentary on
today’s socio-political situation. The jump from Topher Grace’s 1972 David Duke
(the Grand Wizard of the Klan at the time) to modern-day white nationalist and
alt-right movements isn’t much of a jump, and Lee doesn’t equivocate his intentions
with the comparison. By the time the film ends, he makes his jabs explicit with
footage from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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| photo courtesy of vox.com |
The movie has power on
its mind—among other things. Characters are frequently claiming power in BlacKkKlansman. We hear some chant “white
power,” others “black power,” still others “all power for all the people.” And
while some are clearly in the wrong—the film makes no mistakes about who the
villains are—BlacKkKlansman resists
giving easy answers about how to navigate these claims. Stallworth finds
himself caught in tension between his girlfriend Patrice (Laura Harrier, Spider-Man: Homecoming), who sees cops
as enemies, refuses to fraternize with them, and is ultimately unwilling to
make an exception for Stallworth, and his well-intentioned partner Zimmerman,
who admits that his own racial identity (a Jewish one, in his case) has rarely
influenced his self-perception. As the unrivaled hero of the movie, Stallworth’s
willingness to endure such contradictions and complications seems to be the
film’s driving impulse.
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| photo courtesy of indiewire.com |
Sifting through ideas like
these inevitably makes BlacKkKlansman
weighty, but part of Lee’s skill is demonstrated in his ability to keep the
movie feeling light for so long. BlacKkKlansman
nimbly shifts tones from scene to scene, balancing comedy with heavy depictions
of conflict and evil. Toward the end of the film, for instance, we find the
film operating on multiple levels at once: Stallworth’s picture with Duke gets
played for laughs, while the following sequence depicts the bombing with considerable
suspense. Then, only a few scenes later, the cross burning supplies a horrific
reminder of the Klan’s continued presence. Washington and Driver’s performances
also contribute a good deal to this dynamic; they can joke around in one scene
and convincingly adopt the language of the Klan in the next.
The breadth of BlacKkKlansman’s visual imagination is probably
its greatest strength. Lee and cinematographer Chayse Irvin give the entire
film a pleasing palette, but in a few key moments, its imagery takes on an
impressive degree of power. The movie opens with nothing less than one of
cinema’s most iconic moments, the sweeping shot of Vivien Leigh walking through thousands of injured soldiers from Gone
with the Wind. Later, just before the climax of the film, Lee depicts two meetings—the
Klan initiation and a civil rights rally—at once. In one, the Klan watches Birth of a Nation (1915), and Lee lets
us see its racist imagery; in the other, Harry Belafonte’s Jerome Turner
quietly recounts the story of a lynching, accompanied on either side by photographs
of the event. The juxtaposition of the two scenes through parallel editing (one
of Birth of a Nation’s landmark technical achievements) makes a compelling
point.
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| photo courtesy of collider.com |
And then there’s the
haunting final sequence in which Stallworth and Patrice get interrupted by the
cross burning, which gives way seamlessly to the footage from Charlottesville. That
cut—from the Klan’s torchlight to the torchlight of the Charlottesville white
supremacists, overlaid with the Nazi chant “blood and soil”—is one of the single
greatest cuts in film history. In that instant, Lee drives home with force the
point that his opening title sequence makes with humor: that this story is
based on some “fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t.”
TRAILER
Watch the trailer here.
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| photo courtesy of latimes.com |
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