Movie Reaction: BlacKkKlansman

Formula: Mississippi Burning * Super Fly

(That's not really a good "formula" for the movie, but I liked the sound of it and stopped looking for a better one)

Spike Lee is near the top of my list of directors who I want to love but don't. I've seen a decent sampling of his work. Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever left me cold despite their high energy. I don't remember Malcolm X well enough to say how I felt about it other than "Denzel was great". He Got Game was helped by my interest in college basketball. The movie was only so-so otherwise. Inside Man barely even registers as a Spike Lee movie. That movie plays like he's trying to prove something. Chi-Raq got exhausting by the end. Now, he has BlacKkKlansman (I'm referring to it as BKM now, because I keep messing up the three 'k's), which is the most immediately that I've liked one of his films.

BKM has a very accessible premise. In the 1970s, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) becomes the first black officer in the Colorado Springs police department. Quickly he heads up an undercover operation where he infiltrates the local KKK chapter. Hence, the title. Of course, Stallworth has some help. Namely, officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who pretends to be Ron for in person meetings with the Klan - I mean, the Organization.

BKM is Spike Lee in a mode that he's very comfortable and good in. It's also a mode that I don't connect with as much. Lee could make a conventional Hollywood movie if he wanted. I feel like Lee made Inside Man just to prove that if he wanted to play by the rules, he could do it well. He's a great filmmaker. He would rather tackle something with a lot of ideas in it. That's often what turns me off his work. He'd rather make a messy movie that maybe doesn't entirely work but talks about all the things he's thinking about than make a movie that is unassailable on a technical level. I appreciate this about him. I'm still looking for the movie that really works for me though.

BKM has a weird flow to it. Stallworth's undercover operation involves a plot the KKK has against the local Black Student Union. Even though this gets pretty serious, it's not very thrilling. The investigation is more of an excuse for Lee to look at the Black civil rights movement in that era, examine the subversive tactics of the KKK, and address the role of police in discrimination. He does all these things really well. 

The Black Power movement is covered early on with a speech by activist Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), who offers context to the often misunderstood rhetoric that sometimes gets interpreted as a blanket call for violence. Stallworth begins dating Patrice (Laura Harrier), the president of the Black student union. She and Ron explain the differing opinions about police in the black community. I've heard some people complain that the movie leans too heavily into #BlueLivesMatter territory. Frankly, I don't see it. It depicts the police as people. Some are garbage people, and it doesn't take many of them to negate the good being done by the others. Many officers just don't know any better. Some put in an effort to understand struggles other than their own. Some don't. Others simply haven't been forced to think about it. It's a movie about a black police officer fighting the KKK. I mean, who wasn't expecting this movie to have a mostly favorable opinion of police? I'm not sure Spike Lee would've made this movie 25 years ago, so maybe that's where the complaints are coming from.

Everything with the Klan is unsettling in ways that I should've expected by didn't. Basically, the idea is that these guys are fools but a real threat. Lee follows a pattern of undermine, undermine, scare in most of those scenes. He gets us laughing at someone being an idiot or with some dramatic irony, then before the scene ends, we get some sort of reminder that people actually do think this way and this is scary, not funny. It's a tactic that made for a lot of awkward laughter in the theater.

I really wasn't a big fan of any of the performances. I can't figure out what John David Washington was doing. His character is mostly there for other characters to bounce off. He's the straight man. He really doesn't have much of a character arc. He helps everyone else with their character arcs. Adam Driver is fine. His character goes through the biggest awakening throughout the film. It's not a shift from 'racist' to 'not racist'. It's more like 'blind' to 'aware' of the problems African Americans (and other minorities) face. Topher Grace is uncomfortably charming as a young David Duke. Ashlie Atkinson has the most obviously unsettling role as the wife of one of the Klan members. She's bubbly and sweet but also unrepentantly racist. It's almost a cartoonish performance. It's the fact that she stops just short of being a cartoon that makes it so chilling.

I wasn't a fan of the end of the movie. Spike Lee draws some very direct comparisons to the present. To me, it felt like he was trying too hard to make the subtext the text of the film. I didn't think it was that hard to figure out what he was trying to say in the movie before that. The comparisons were pretty obvious as they were. I feel like he gave up on his audience being able to figure things out at the very end. It's like when someone explains the punchline to a joke after you already laughed at it.

BlacKkKlansman is a good movie. It's accessible without Spike Lee needing to abandon the things that make him unique as a director. It's impossible to label it in a specific genre, which I mean in a good way. It is shaggy and prone to go on detours that don't neatly fit with the main story. I liked the cast and appreciate the restraint in a lot of the performances. This could've easily been populated with lazy caricatures. It has a healthy mix of cathartic laughs and sobering truths. If I could find a couple more Spike Lee movies I like as much as this, I might finally become a Spike Lee fan.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend