‘Blackkklansman’ Directed by Spike Lee
Cannes ’18 Review by Peter Belsito
This is the best, most important film I saw at Cannes. It should be — hope so! — massively seen upon its USA release.
Let me start by saying — confessing, self criticizing really — that I have dismissed, bad mouthed Spike Lee for the last 25 years. As a filmmaker I considered him subsequently irrelevant after an auspicious beginning with several films. I also disliked his public persona as self important and loud mouthing.
As far as I’m concerned now anything he does (!!) is okay if it gets people, especially young ones to view this very important American political work.
BlacKkKlansman was adapted from a book by Ron Stallworth, Colorado Springs’ first black police officer, who in the early 1970s succeeded in infiltrating the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The sheer absurdity of the circumstances clearly inspired Lee and his three co-writers to play the material, ingeniously, for laughs as well as jolts: Moments of suspenseful police-procedural buildup are heightened, rather than undercut, by an edgy comic tension in scene after scene.
Facing discrimination and harassment from white cops not long after he joins the all white force, a young black guy, Ron (John David Washington, son of Denzel) decides one day to call up the Klan on a whim (their number is listed in the newspaper) and pretend to be an aspiring member.
There’s a priceless cutaway to Stallworth’s colleagues, looking on with deadpan befuddlement as this epithet-spouting, Afro-sporting rookie rails on the phone about how much he hates blacks, Jews and anyone else without “pure white Aryan blood” running through their veins.
Some of the funniest moments will come later, such as when when Ron chats on the phone with a young David Duke (Topher Grace), grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who proceeds to set himself up for some of the most humiliating self-owns in recent memory.
The movie comes together when a fellow cop named Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, excellent) reluctantly agrees to join the undercover investigation, with the real Ron working the phones talking ‘Klan talk’ to the KKK folks and Flip playing him in the flesh. It’s an unwieldy arrangement that seems ripe for all manner of dangerous slip-ups, and Lee stages Flip’s meetings with “the organization,” as the KKK prefers to call itself, with unnerving flair.
At one point, the most frighteningly volatile of the Klansmen (the terrific Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen), suspects (correctly) that Flip might be Jewish and tells him to drop his pants and show if he’s “circumstanced.”
Lee, of course, has never been one for subtlety, and many would conclude that these are not times that call for it. The director uses “Ron’s” conflicted double identity to give the movie a dialectical structure, at one point juxtaposing a Klan initiation ceremony, replete with hoods and robes, with a somber meeting of Colorado College’s Black Student Union, whose outspoken president, Patrice (Laura Harrier), becomes Ron’s love interest and unwitting informant.
If “BlacKkKlansman” is not above turning its characters into mouthpieces for its ideas, it wards off excessive didacticism by giving those ideas a heady flow and a sustained pulse. There’s real, expressive joy in its anger. This is also very politically relevant material handled very well.
Lee, who understands the importance of the medium as well as the message, has in some ways made a movie about movies: The first shot is a famous scene from “Gone With the Wind,” and at one point we see Duke and other Klansmen getting their jollies by watching “The Birth of a Nation.” That film, the first (1915) successful commercial feature is a KKK plug piece throughout, glorifying their murders etc.
Whatever laughter the movie musters dies in your throat as it builds to a crescendo of horrific images from last summer’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., forging parallels between white-supremacist activities, now and then, which are no less infuriating for being fairly obvious.
The real Duke pops up in news footage, as does President Trump, drawing his now-notorious false equivalency between the protesters “on both sides.” (Lee, not holding back, denounced Trump with a 12-letter expletive at his press conference in Cannes.)
The close to this film, in the conflict at Charlottesville, Va. really moved me and I think nails its importance as a profound political statement about USA race relations. A film which must be seen.
“BlacKkKlansman” immediately stirred Palme d’Or talk after its premiere; but it did not win that award (the best in Cannes).
Lee’s riotous “BlacKkKlansman,” about an African-American police officer who successfully infiltrates a local Ku Klux Klan chapter, was instead awarded the ‘next best Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
“I take this on the behalf of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York,” Lee said as he accepted the coveted award.
The Focus Features release is set to open Aug. 10, nearly a year to the day after the Charlottesville protests.
Its warm embrace so far is an auspicious sign for what will almost certainly be a more divided theatrical reception, and for good reason…. it took a Spike Lee joint to draw real blood.
CREW: Director: Spike Lee. Screenplay: Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth. Camera (color): Chayse Irvin. Editor: Barry Alexander Brown. Music: Terence Blanchard.
WITH: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Jasper Paakkonen, Corey Hawkins, Ryan Eggold, Michael Joseph Buscemi, Paul Walter Hauser, Ashlie Atkinson.
PRODUCTION: A Focus Features release, presented with Legendary, in association with Perfect World Pictures, of a QC Entertainment, Blumhouse Prods., Monkeypaw Prods., 40 Acres and a Mule production. (International sales: Focus Features Intl., London.) Producers: Jason Blum, Spike Lee, Raymond Mansfield, SeanMcKittrick, Jordan Peele, Shaun Redick. Executive producers: Marcei A. Brown, Edward H. Hamm Jr. Co-producers: David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel.
International: UPI, UIP. U.S.: Focus
