Background
Spike Lee was born on 20 March 1956 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Spike Lee was born on 20 March 1956 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Educated at Morehouse College and graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
His unsmiling entrepreneur pose and his inclination to have no one not black write about Malcolm X were allied with his limits as a director. The early films by Lee seem to me opportunistic, stylistically uncertain, naive yet reckless (Do the Right Thing). Jungle Fever failed to deal with the real human story and the mixed motives of interracial love or sex. It could be seen how tough it was to be a black movie director, without having to assume the profile of Black Movie Director. It was so cold in the theater, and Malcolm X reached so far into the evening.
It is a movie that needs its three-plus hours, because it concerns change and needs to feel gradual. Malcolm X is also the work of a man Lee had hitherto lacked the confidence to reveal. It is measured, careful, a little distant even; it has largely set aside fireworks; and it is almost as if, in studying Malcolm, Lee has himself developed. There was an attempt in Do the Right Thing to show that everyone had his or her reasons, but it was thwarted by the agitprop scenario. In Malcolm X, however, the enlargement of Malcolm’s own perspectives becomes the structure of the film—without any need to treat him as Helen Keller or Rocky Balboa. The melodrama was gone.
It is no small thing for an American movie to lead its audiences into an unfamiliar religion, and then out of it, without ever lapsing into zealotry or scorn. Yet Malcolm X is a movie about the need for religion, or moral steadfastness; and as its central character complicates his thinking, so he distills his behavior, and the flashy “Red "-ism of the first half settles into Denzel Washington’s extraordinary. meditative performance.
One might argue that Lee’s prior films were his “Red” period, with one eye on art, another on “rep,” and a third on how to make the next film.
Lee's Malcolm battles through many kinds of fierceness to a kind of liberal humanism. II Lee has himself made that journey—and in the movie it does feel achieved—then he might want to try Jungle Fever again, or do a movie, or two or three, with white material, or stories that do not depend upon just one color. In which case, his continued interest in style, his verve with actors, his ear and his eve could be the basis for an extraordinary career. Malcolm X makes serious demands on its audiences—but graver ones still on Lee.
The great thing about Lee is that he has not tired or (altered. The question mark still hangs over the degree of his talent. So he has been a growing presence, producing such films as Tales from llie Hood (95, Rusty Cundieff); New Jersey Drive (95, Nick Gomez); The Besi Man (99, Malcolm D. Lee); Love ir Basketball (00, Gina Prince). But, in truth, none of those films is remarkable, or as daring and accomplished, as Do the Bight Thing.
As a director, too, Lee has not matched his own best work. Cloekers is a good picture of the drugs in the citv. but more dogged than brilliant. Bamboozled—an attempt at satire—fell rather flat. Best of all was Summer of Sam. a great film in the making, but one that gave away its own control to lots of raw talk, improvs for their own sake, a settling for urban atmosphere, and a tough treatment of women. But Lee is doing so much, and he is still only in his mid-forties. He is capable of a great film about Newr York—and it might be better if he saw that as his subject and let the responsibility of being the best black director around look after itself.