It's unique among Spike Lee's bad movies in that it doesn't suffer from a lack of commitment. Most of Spike's turkeys seem wanly unengaged in their subject matter: does anyone think he really cared about a confused phone-sex operator (in GIRL 6) or a non-dysfunctional family having solvable problems (in CROOKLYN)? In SUMMER OF SAM, Spike Lee tries to put on his Martin Scorsese costume, roll up the sleeves and dig into the mess at hand, but then he doesn't, quite.
Making his first movie that's almost exclusively about white people seems to fill him with ambivalence. He wants to go at the Bronx Italian-American milieu straight, but he's full of resentments and has a few comments he'd like to add. And by the end, you realize that he's assembled these guidos in the drawing room to reenact the same replay of Bensonhurst lynch-mob violence that stood behind DO THE RIGHT THING. (It's as if Lee were getting at his Oedipal relationship to Scorsese by compulsively pointing out Italian-American racism--as if Scorsese hadn't done that already!)
Spike has everything in his corner here: angry goombahs, a colorfully dumpy Jewish serial killer, Mira Sorvino looking puzzled and hurt at a Plato's Retreat orgy, Jimmy Breslin talking into the camera, a surreal-looking Reggie Jackson, boylesque dancing, porn, blood, the Who. And yet the film shares one thing in common with other unsuccessful Spike joints: the scenes are non-scenes, the story is untold. In a good Spike Lee movie, the scenes are really built; you might not like them, but you wouldn't miss them in a Sherman tank. In a bad one, nothing has shape--the actors have that insecure so-who-am-I-again? look and Lee covers up the wobbly improv with wall-to-wall music. SUMMER OF SAM drags on for two and a half hours, and you find yourself asking, "Guinea hairdresser has bad sex, David Berkowitz shoots coeds--the connection being?"
SUMMER OF SAM may have started, in Spike Lee's mind, as an Oliver Stone-style madhouse allegory--Son of Sam as Uncle Sam. (It would be interesting to see what Michael Imperioli's original modest, indie script looked like.) What it has ended up as is another movie where Spike Lee gets impressed by a recent impressive film, and filters it through his sports-talk-radio sensibility--in this case, BOOGIE NIGHTS, which, ghostlike, reappears in tired Steadicam trolleys through a disco, plagiaristic music choices, and what we might call the Overambitious Seventies Canvas. Spike Lee exasperates us--that's his beauty, and that's sadly what will probably forever rob him of his due: recognition as one of the best American filmmakers. It may be time to acknowledge that empathy is not part of his bag of tricks. It was once--in DO THE RIGHT THING, where everyone was simultaneously right and all wrong. But it isn't now, and we can only pray a subject engages him again, before he stops getting turns at bat.
Making his first movie that's almost exclusively about white people seems to fill him with ambivalence. He wants to go at the Bronx Italian-American milieu straight, but he's full of resentments and has a few comments he'd like to add. And by the end, you realize that he's assembled these guidos in the drawing room to reenact the same replay of Bensonhurst lynch-mob violence that stood behind DO THE RIGHT THING. (It's as if Lee were getting at his Oedipal relationship to Scorsese by compulsively pointing out Italian-American racism--as if Scorsese hadn't done that already!)
Spike has everything in his corner here: angry goombahs, a colorfully dumpy Jewish serial killer, Mira Sorvino looking puzzled and hurt at a Plato's Retreat orgy, Jimmy Breslin talking into the camera, a surreal-looking Reggie Jackson, boylesque dancing, porn, blood, the Who. And yet the film shares one thing in common with other unsuccessful Spike joints: the scenes are non-scenes, the story is untold. In a good Spike Lee movie, the scenes are really built; you might not like them, but you wouldn't miss them in a Sherman tank. In a bad one, nothing has shape--the actors have that insecure so-who-am-I-again? look and Lee covers up the wobbly improv with wall-to-wall music. SUMMER OF SAM drags on for two and a half hours, and you find yourself asking, "Guinea hairdresser has bad sex, David Berkowitz shoots coeds--the connection being?"
SUMMER OF SAM may have started, in Spike Lee's mind, as an Oliver Stone-style madhouse allegory--Son of Sam as Uncle Sam. (It would be interesting to see what Michael Imperioli's original modest, indie script looked like.) What it has ended up as is another movie where Spike Lee gets impressed by a recent impressive film, and filters it through his sports-talk-radio sensibility--in this case, BOOGIE NIGHTS, which, ghostlike, reappears in tired Steadicam trolleys through a disco, plagiaristic music choices, and what we might call the Overambitious Seventies Canvas. Spike Lee exasperates us--that's his beauty, and that's sadly what will probably forever rob him of his due: recognition as one of the best American filmmakers. It may be time to acknowledge that empathy is not part of his bag of tricks. It was once--in DO THE RIGHT THING, where everyone was simultaneously right and all wrong. But it isn't now, and we can only pray a subject engages him again, before he stops getting turns at bat.