In this way, Da 5 Bloods is like many of Lee’s films - willing to break the rules of fiction and nonfiction, of the separation between audience and movie with which moviegoers have been trained to watch films. It’s also propulsively immersive I half expected someone to stick a fist through the screen and grab me.
It’s a bloody, screwy, incendiary piece of work, and I loved it, especially when it goes flying off the rails near the end. Watching Da 5 Bloods, I found myself frequently pinned to my couch, laughing at the acerbic and sometimes goofball humor, at least when I wasn’t biting my fist. In Da 5 Bloods, Lee brings back many of his signature filmmaking moves that rope the audience into the story What it means to be black in America does not fit into tidy fables. That narrative choice alone means that Da 5 Bloods, while political to the bone, refuses to be stuffed into partisan pigeonholes. Lindo gives a staggering performance as Paul, whose traumas have turned him into a MAGA-hat-sporting spout of paranoia, to the discomfort of both his friends and his son, David (Majors), a Morehouse alum who comes looking for his father after he returns to Vietnam. Then he extends it into today, all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement.īut Lee and his BlacKkKlansman co-writer Kevin Willmott (working from an initial draft by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo) never make the narrative lines too straight. Lee weaves that strand of history into the broader canvas of the 1960s and ’70s, from the civil rights movement to the moon landing. Jonathan Majors, Isiah Witlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, and Delroy Lindo in Da 5 Bloods. They came back to a hell of a different kind. Starring Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jonathan Majors, and a magnificent Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods takes on myriad issues (no one would ever accuse Spike Lee of aiming too low), starting with the Vietnam veterans, a sharply disproportionate number of whom are black and who were left to live with the remnants of a pointless war long past when the rest of us had moved on. But Da 5 Bloods is also a fiery union of his fiercest themes - race, trauma, and power’s corrupting effect - with a particular interest in when past history and present reality start rhyming. On its surface, it’s a tale of four black Vietnam vets who return to the country decades after their tours of duty in search of gold and their fallen buddy’s remains. Like that film, Da 5 Bloods leans into genre trappings (this time, some cross between a war movie and a buddy comedy), but with a bent that’s all Lee. His latest and 24th feature film is Da 5 Bloods, which follows on the heels of his first competitive Oscar win for 2018’s BlacKkKlansman’s adapted screenplay. It’s arguably the most indispensable movie about race and police violence from an American director - certainly among the top five - and it launched a career that’s littered with peaks and valleys, messes and masterpieces, and always indubitably the work of Spike Lee. In 1989, Do the Right Thing was a bona fide sensation, netting the director an Oscar nomination and a berth in the canon of great American film directors. It went on to win a Student Academy Award. His 1983 master’s thesis film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads was the first student film ever to play in Lincoln Center’s prestigious New Directors/New Films festival. Lee, who turned 63 in March, exploded onto the scene while he was still in graduate school. Spike Lee with the cast of Da 5 Bloods: Isiah Whitlock Jr., Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, and Norm Lewis. He’s a provocateur who doesn’t need to tell you how provocative he - or, most importantly, his work - is. (For a recent example, consider The Hunt, a movie which, if it were an actual person, would have smugly added “provocateur” to its Twitter bio as soon as someone got mad about it.) But Lee has been landing jabs and uppercuts and sometimes even haymakers on his targets for decades. Plenty of filmmakers aspire to be “provocative,” to make the audience feel uncomfortable and exhilarated all at once. He is, in content and in form, a true filmmaker of urgency. Lee’s films don’t scream, “Now, more than ever!” The word “urgent” is a critical bromide, but Lee lives outside the cliché. Like it or not, you become part of the movie.Īnd it’s not just his pointedly apposite subject matter that sucks you in. But when you watch a Spike Lee joint, you’re not allowed the luxury of objectivity. Oh, he’ll entertain you, no doubt about that. When Lee makes a film, he isn’t thinking of you as another passive body in a seat, munching on popcorn, being entertained by a story he’s cooked up. Spike Lee does not let you simply watch his movies.
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