EPILOGUE: EXPANDING HORIZONS

People think I’m this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage. – Spike Lee in 2008 (Colapinto)

Spike Lee’s America is a diversified place, populated not only by African-Americans but also by Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and other-Americans, by women as well as men, by gays as well as straights. Yet even after the critical success of Summer of Sam and the commercial success of Inside Man, he has remained more an African-American filmmaker than simply an American filmmaker in the minds of many moviegoers, and this perception has surely been a factor in the lackluster box-office records of many of his joints. After the good (not excellent) showing of Malcolm X in 1992, ticket sales for Lee’s films followed a general downward trend. “It got to where people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, when’s your next movie coming out?’ – and I had one opening the next day,” he told New Yorker writer John Colapinto just before the premiere of Miracle at St. Anna in 2008.

The perception of Lee as an angry black man (throwing garbage cans through windows) and as an angry black man (poorly representing women and gay people) is fed by shortcomings in his films, which revolve almost entirely around straight males, and by intemperate remarks, as when he dubbed the Warner Bros. studio “The Plantation” at the very time it was preparing to distribute Malcolm X in American theaters. Miracle at St. Anna was, among other things, a rare Spike Lee stab at broadening his cultural horizons by exploring American characters in a non-American setting, as he had done in Malcolm X but hardly at all since. If the war movie had succeeded, it could have expanded Lee’s public image beyond its previous boundaries while maintaining his status as the cinema’s most reliable chronicler of African-American life.

At this writing, it appears that Lee will be expanding his horizons in a direction few would have predicted, directing an American version of Oldboy, a 2003 thriller by Chan-wook Park, one of South Korea’s most internationally respected directors. According to industry scuttlebutt, Josh Brolin will play the protagonist, Joe Douchett, a man who is kidnapped and imprisoned in a room without explanation for fifteen years, and then abruptly released, whereupon he sets about finding his captor and exacting revenge. Adrian Pryce is expected to play Sharlto Copley, the villain, and Elizabeth Olsen may join the production in the female lead. The screenplay, based on the Japanese manga comic by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi, is by Mark Protosevich, a thoroughly commercial writer whose credits include Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (2006) and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (2011). The major stars, hot Hollywood screenwriter, and Asian provenance of the story are an interesting combination of elements for Lee to manage, and interest in the project is high.

Even in his off periods, Lee has remained a hard worker and a determined artist. Difficulties and disappointments after the failure of Miracle of St. Anna blocked off pathways to theatrical films for a few years, but the following year he documented the Broadway production of Passing Strange and made the feature-length TV documentary Kobe Doin’ Work, about Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant, for the ESPN sports network. In 2010 he made the two-part TV documentary If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, the sequel to When the Levees Broke, and directed Da Brick, an HBO television drama. A new feature film, Red Hook Summer, opened in August 2012. It centers on Flik Royale (Jules Brown), an unhappy Atlanta boy spending the summer in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, where his poor but spirited grandfather, Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse (Clarke Peters), wants to make him a Christian believer. The old man’s undertaking is hindered by Flik’s first impressions of inner-city hardship and dysfunction, but the boy becomes less cynical through his friendship with Chazz Morningstar (Toni Lysaith), a lovely girl who sees good things beneath the borough’s hard-edged surface. The film was promoted as a new instalment in Spike Lee’s Chronicles of Brooklyn, and its pedigree is clear in everything from names – Lee plays Mr. Mookie, for instance, and Da Good Bishop recalls The Good Reverend Doctor in Jungle Fever – to its fundamentally affectionate portrait of what remains Lee’s favorite place on earth.

In another nice irony of his career, Lee is sometimes compared with one of the most relentlessly white-centric writer-directors in American film: Woody Allen, who likewise favors New York City locations and also releases about a movie a year, although he doesn’t have anything like Lee’s workaholic schedule in other media as well, and he doesn’t have a major gig like Lee’s position as artistic director of New York University’s graduate film program (yet another ironic development in Spike’s career, given his complaints about his experiences as a student there) . “He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 a.m.,” Colapinto reports. “You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning,” Lee told the journalist. The rest, he said, is “time management.”

It is impossible to predict whether the most important part of Lee’s legacy will lie in the seventeen features he created during the twenty-two years between She’s Gotta Have It and Miracle at St. Anna, or whether those productions will be eclipsed by works made in the later phases of his career. If the former is the case, it’s safe to speculate that he will be honored as the writer-director of an incontestable masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, and an indispensable historical biopic, Malcolm X, as well as lesser works that look more impressive and exciting with every passing year, such as the irrepressible college satire School Daze, the heartbreaking urban melodrama Clockers, and the morally charged thriller Inside Man. It is also likely that 25th Hour will increasingly be seen as a pivotal film of the early twenty-first century and an inspired summation of Lee’s deepest, richest intuitions about America in all its breadth, variety, exasperating imperfection, and near-infinite promise for those who, like Spike Lee, put anger and striving aside from time to time and open themselves to currents of imagination, creativity, and the possibility that America will someday embrace the equality for which Lee’s great heroes, Malcolm and Martin, gave their lives.