[usr 4.5]
Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer from Colorado Springs, CO, successfully manages to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan branch with the help of a Jewish surrogate who eventually becomes its leader. Based on actual events.
Spike Lee’s been grinding an ax. He always has. That’s part of what makes his movies so flavorful and unique and wonderful. He doesn’t shy away from horrific moments (usually centered around racial violence and racism itself.) I guess ‘grinding an ax’ and ‘a bone to pick’ are bad ways to describe it. You see, Spike Lee has been on the forefront of confrontational cinema since the ’80s when he banded with Public Enemy to make “Do the Right Thing” (a movie listed on the Criterion Collection and constantly breaching the top twenty greatest movie lists from AFI to IMDb.) This new movie, produced by Jordan Peele, continues that tradition but with more closure than his previous films ever had.
Meet Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a smooth dressing black man from the ’80s fresh into the police force. He’s wide-eyed and good-natured enough to ignore the casual racism of the Colorado Springs Police Force, earning him a spot as an undercover detective. While he’s assigned the task of infiltrating the local Black Student Union to see if they pose a threat he decides to investigate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to see if they pose an even greater threat. While Stallworth negotiates his way into the chapter over the phone, Adam Driver’s Flip Zimmerman poses as the in-person Ron Stallworth. Together, the two uncover the dangerous potential of ex-military, racially prejudiced men who congregate together at firearms practice.
This movie’s about the story of Ron Stallworth, and it tells that story well, but Spike Lee opens the movie with footage from “Gone With the Wind” (a Civil War story) over Alec Baldwin literally hacking up phlegm trying to discuss the “miscegenation of the American people.” It’s poignant as visual allegory because, throughout the film, Lee continues to show the different popular depictions of African American people in cinema: the pimps and detectives of Blaxploitation movies, the slaves of “Gone With the Wind,” and the horrible depiction (if you can call it that) in “Birth of a Nation” (arguably the first blockbuster ever made with a VERY questionable march of the Ku Klux Klan.) Lee’s interviews and acceptance speeches make very clear his bone to pick is as much with “Birth of a Nation” as it is with racism in America. The film is held up as one of the great pillars of cinematic history, but that history is clearly tainted in ways every modern audience can agree is blatant racism. Why then, he asks, do we continue to passively acknowledge its status as canon? In a similar way, his movie asks, why do we passively ignore the racism around us when it has proven to be dangerous and violent time and time again?
You see one of the tricks to this movie is its incredible relevance to our modern era. Even though the movie is set in the ’80s, it plays certain moments very on the nose alluding to our current day and age. David Duke, Grand Wizard of the entire KKK, tells his comrades-in-white-hoods, “this is why people need you and I in positions of power. So we can get America uhh, what’s the right word for it? Greatness! Back again.” Playing that scene and another one where Flip Zimmerman says something along the lines of “there’s no way someone in power would fail to deny the Ku Klux Klan of all people,” Spike Lee’s almost looking directly at us waving his arms back and forth like “See? See what happened?” Even as Ron Stallworth and Flip Zimmerman struggle through incredibly tense scenes of “will they get caught,” we get the feeling this movie was very intentionally made not for retro-nostalgia but for helping recognize the similarities between then and now.
Lee’s camerawork always speaks for itself and this movie stands among the rest of his work for its ingenuity. Slant angles slant more and more as time progresses showing us John David Washington’s world slowly upending over the course of the movie. There’s always a ‘snorricam’ shot (it’s hard to explain but if you watch a bunch of Spike Lee movies then you notice the one shot he always uses.) The costuming shines most of all. I imagine John David Washington had the time of his life dressing the role of a ’70s Blaxploitation hero. This movie has fewer gunfights and car chases and more of the raw tension you’d expect from a Shakespearean tragedy where everybody’s pretending to be someone else and you know someone’s going to die from it.
The film’s plotting feels tightly wound and even in scenes full of joy you get an impending sense of doom. The two detectives get drawn deeper and deeper into the harrowing world of these Colorado Klansmen. It’s an impressive figure to watch on its own, delivering on an ungodly amount of racial epithets (I haven’t heard this many racial slurs since “Django Unchained” I think.) Unlike “Django,” the closure we get feels powerful, but the threat of the KKK lingers on, and that’s Spike Lee’s point.
Lee opens and closes the film with two codas. One, Alec Baldwin’s racist diatribe over “Gone with the Wind,” and the second being all real footage of the Klan march at Charlottesville and the subsequent car attack on counter protestors (inter-spliced with footage of President Trump decrying both groups of protestors for extra measure.) He makes his point very clear: the true story of Ron Stallworth proved the KKK wants to be something more than a “social club for white supremacists.” The large majority of Americans felt they existed only in old black and white movies or the backwoods of Colorado. Americans believed they would never pose more of a threat than they did in the ’80s. Yet here we stand, a year or more in the aftermath of young white faces clearly crying new chants for the same old cause. A cold ice bath after the warm closure of “BlackkKlansman,” Spike Lee shows us that a group we thought long declawed has returned, stronger than ever, and our Federal government’s leadership’s failure to vilify them has added fuel to their fire. Brace yourselves friends, because Spike Lee’s “ax to grind” has swung and I imagine it’ll swing a few more times before we get to 2020.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and On Demand November 6th
