Spike Lee gives actors time to make difficult people worth watching. We value his energy and his curiosity about black American lives, though Malcolm X shows how readily his patience can become excessive reverence.
Fi1m perspective
In Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee lets the young Malcolm’s criminal life be enjoyable to watch. Denzel Washington plays him as someone worth attending to now, without asking us to wait for the important man he will become. We were unsettled by how readily we accepted his choices, because Lee gives the appeal of that life enough energy for us to feel it. The performance is allowed to develop without every scene explaining what comes next.
Lee’s feature debut was She’s Gotta Have It (1986), followed by the breakthrough of Do the Right Thing (1989). He wrote, directed and acted in both; the latter examines racial tensions in Brooklyn on a hot day. Black American experience and urban life in New York recur across his films, alongside such devices as direct-to-camera address and archival footage. With Malcolm X, the scale grew to a 202-minute biography.
Cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson gives the early criminal world of Malcolm X an immediacy that the more formal passages struggle to sustain. Wynn Thomas’s production design makes the surroundings worth attending to even while Washington holds our interest. Lee lets these scenes be pleasurable, and the film is better for it.
The difficulty comes when he grows too careful with his subject. Barry Alexander Brown’s editing keeps the account clear, but several scenes continue after they have made their point. Terence Blanchard’s music adds weight to Lee’s solemnity when Washington has already given us enough to consider. We sometimes wanted the scenes cut shorter and the score to ease off.
Lee has since moved through drama, satire, heist films and documentaries, with BlacKkKlansman (2018) and the Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods (2020) among the later work. That variety is a reason not to take the solemn stretches of Malcolm X as the whole of what he does. Begin there for his work with actors, but allow a long evening.
Biography
Spike Lee is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He was born Shelton Jackson Lee on 20 March 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied at Morehouse College and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where his student film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) won a Student Academy Award. He founded the production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.
Lee made his feature directorial debut with She's Gotta Have It (1986). His subsequent films include Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), in which he also wrote the screenplay, produced and appeared as Shorty, 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). He appeared as himself in the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994).
Lee won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKkKlansman. He has received additional Academy Award nominations and other honours including a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Malcolm X.
