Movie Reviews

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Do the Right Thing, a film by Spike Lee.

Defending his film on ABC's "Nightline, Spike Lee, looking exasperated and weary, exploded like a character in his own movie overburdened by the heat. "This is not a film about good guys and bad guys," he said. "It doesn't end with Mookie and Sal hugging each other and singing 'We Are the World."

Lee was responding to Jose Williams, a thoughtful civil rights proponent who helped create "Eyes on the Prize," a documentary of the civil rights movement. Williams, speaking with an element of truth, objected that the film lacks a "positive vision."

Other African-American critics, like Stanley Crouch, have attacked the film harshly as the tawdry fascination of a middle-class Black, Lee, with the "underclass."

In truth, there is no crusading Black minister fighting the forces of racism in this film. Nor is there a courageous young woman trying to hold a family together, nor a young man with a chemistry set or a saxophone and a dream. In fact, there are no cliches at all. Spike Lee loves his community, and in this film he has dared to challenge conventional images. Only someone who loves you will tell you the truth—and the truth can hurt.

If this film has an affinity with anything, it is Greek tragedy, with smaller-sized heroes confronted by unseen forces. The unities of time and place are strictly observed; on this one boiling block in Bedford-Stuyvesant is a social microcosm of America's racial attitudes.

"Do the Right thing" feels like a classic almost from the beginning. This film will last. It may be the best American film about race relations ever.

The life of a community Mookie, the pizza delivery man played by Spike Lee, is not the first character we meet. The film is really about the life of a community, and Lee presents three oracular figures, one at a time, who represent three different sides of the community's life.

The stage is set by Mr. Senor Love Daddy, the rhymin' and jivin' D.J. who is the musical soul of the block. Next, there is Smiley, a handicapped stutterer, as dysfunctional verbally as the D.J. is facile. Smiley sells pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King-and is ignored by everyone. With this image, Lee seems to be commenting on the fate of these leaders in the community today.

Then there is the self-appointed "Mayor," rendered wonderfully by Ossie Davis, an elderly drunk who tries to hold together the community-and his own dignity-in the face of youthful taunters.

When we first see Mookie, he is counting money. He talks about money a lot. Mookie has no dreams. He lives in a world too unsentimental for that. Like all the characters in the film, with the exception of Sal, the business of his life is survival. ' Yet Mookie knows how people work, and he understands the racism that pervades his world, even if he can't change it. He even works on PinoSal's elder, racist son, who "hates fuckin' niggers." Mookie hilariously tries to make him see the irrationality of his views.

"You do what you gotta"

The plot turns on the action of Buggin Out and Radio Raheem. Buggin Out protests that there are only Italians on the "wall of fame" in the pizzeria, but "no brothers."

"It's a free country," Sal replies. "You want brothers, get your own pizzeria, and you can put anybody you want on the wall." In a nutshell, we have the conflict between property rights and the rights of free speech placed before us. Buggin Out then decides to organize a boycott of Sal's pizzeria—which is completely unsuccessful. People like Sal.

The philosophical content is stated by the Mayor and Sal. It is the Mayor who tells Mookie, "Always do the right thing," and Dodger By MILLIE GONZALEZ Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," is an unblinkingly fresh approach to the contradictions in race relations. If you are looking for a documentary on the plight of minorities in urban America, you'll be disappointed. This film, however, is good drama—and good drama has roots in reality.

The film takes place on one street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y. The setting, the color, and the dialogue are all somewhat stylized. Buildings are painted in bright yellows and reds-giving emphasis to Sal, defending himself before the community, who grimly states, "You do what you gotta." It is Mookie's tragedy that he is caught in the grip of these imperatives.

If there is a weakness in the film, it is that the female characters are largely confined to the background. Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) watches over the block too, almost like a religious symbol. She "sees all," like the eyes on the billboard in "The Great Gatsby."

Tina screams at Mookie, justifiably, for paying her scant attention and being a poor father to their son. Jade, Mookie's sister and roommate, demands that Mookie get a "real job," move out, and take care of what should be his family. The complaints of the women are real, but all they have to offer are complaints.

In Bed-Stuy, everyone is vulnerable, and everyone has a legitimate gripe against everyone else. Some gripes are not legitimate, however, and those are everyone's racial attitude. The racism of the whites is familiar and expected. But Spike Lee is not afraid to look at the attitudes of the Blacks.

"On no postage stamp"

Radio Raheem is full of Black pride. He wears an Africa pendant and a "Bed-Stuy" Ishirt. His enormous boom box blasts "the only song I like," "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy. "My heroes ain't on no postage stamp," they rap-and ultimately, it is this dilemma that lies at the movie's core.

But Radio Raheem has no place for anyone else's heroes. His radio overblasts the Puerto Ricans' salsa music. And he roundly abuses the Koreans, demanding that they speak "mo' fuckin' English." When he walks into Sal's pizzeria the second time with "Fight the Power" blaring, he unwittingly provokes the fatal confrontation toward which the movie has been building. * When Sal destroys Radio's cultural symbol (the radio), Radio locks him in a grasp that seems sure to strangle him. The cops arrive and mete out to Radio the death he sought to impose on Sal.

Radio and Sal twin the heated situation.

The characters in the film likewise serve as a vehicle to depict anger and bigotry in a creative yet realistic manner. Lee shows how each ethnic group faults another for its problems. The camera flashes from one person to another as denunciations are made of one group after another.

Spike's character, Mookie, vents his anger against Italians. A Korean spouts ugly verbiage against Jews. A white cop ridicules Puerto Ricans. And an Italian puts down Blacks.

To further drive home the point, Lee uses three men from the neighborhood to serve as a running commentary on what they see is wrong with the world.

In one scene, one of the men complains about how fast the Koreans have risen in the human, tragically flawed by their intolerance of the other's cultural symbols. But the power is on Sal's side. Sal's tragedy is that racism, his fatal flaw, has blinded him so that he cannot see Radio Raheem's tragedy. He sees only his own loss.

Two leaders laughing together Unlike the African-American critics of the film, some white critics have attacked the film for the violent aftermath to Radio's death and Mookie's role in it. I heard this in the hostile tone with which a national Public Radio interviewer questioned Spike Lee.

"You conclude the movie with two quotes," she pressed, "one by Martin Luther King and one by Malcolm X. One opposed violence, the other justified it. Which one do you want us to accept?"

You could hear the tone of exasperation in the filmmaker's voice: "It's not an either/or thing." In fact, the lasting image of the film is the picture showing the two leaders laughing together-which is also the "positive image" Spike Lee leaves us with.

But the interviewer was still dissatisfied: Surely, Spike Lee didn't want us to take Malcolm X's words as being equal to King's! I suppose for this reason the film will be denied the Academy Award it richly deserves.

An auditory "vision"

You have to listen to this movie as much as watch it. Listen to more than the dialogue. Spike Lee is the most musically aware filmmaker working today; he even wrote some of the score himself.

In the background are not only the sounds of jazz, pop, soul, and rap, but orchestral vignettes that sound like an odd blend of Aaron Copeland and McCoy Tyner, profoundly "American-sounding" in the chord construction and yet dissonant.

The music is an auditory "vision" of Spike Lee's America. The cinematography and staging works much like the music. Lee uses lots of oblique angle shots to dramatize, perhaps, the way we see each other. He also has the characters speak head-on into the camera in one sequence, hilariously venting their pent-up racial animosities in up-tempo, full-throttle release.

There are certain ideologues who go to the movies hoping to see their preconceived notions reinforced so they can walk out saying, "Yes, life is just like I say it is." You won't get this for your six dollars from Spike Lee. What you will get is something far richer—a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense that will move you to genuine pity and terror.

owner) that is symbolic of the violence between minority groups. Instead of venting their rage against the capitalist system (the source of their depressed and degrading living conditions), they come to blows against each other.

The cops are called in to restrain Sal and Radio Raheem. A riot ensues after one of the white cops engages Raheem in a fatal choke hold. The neighborhood destroys Sal's pizzeria. (But the Korean's shop is spared after he protests, "I'm one of you.")

Some critics contend that this movie does nothing to improve race relations. They charge that it might incite violence. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a child living in "Bed-Stuy," our community was just as depressed and divided. Although some themes of the film are enigmatic, one theme that comes through is that our social system encourages this anger and violence.

Divided as a people, nothing can improve. We leave the theater disturbed by the injustices done to everyone.