Over the past six years Spike Lee has been working a lot, but only few of his projects have been feature-length fictional films. Red Hook Summer is a return to the medium, and it is a return for Lee to many of the ideas, characters, and themes that begin his career, namely conflict within an inner city neighborhood between generations, sexes, races, and classes. If you need a stronger link between the Bed-Stuy-based Do the Right Thing (1989) and the Red Hook, Brooklyn-based Red Hook Summer, just look to Lee himself, who reprises his character Mookie in the new film.
Lee?s re-introduction of Mookie comes during an intriguing small moment in the new film. After we?ve met Atlanta-born-and-bread Flik Royale (Jules Brown), the young boy who has come to Red Hook to spend the summer with his grandfather, Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse (Clarke Peters), Enoch brings him out into the neighborhood and we begin to meet the characters that populate the paths and breezeways in and around Red Hook?s tough-nosed projects. A woman turns away from the pair and begins talking directly to the left of the camera, walking towards the lens. As she approaches, the camera pans back until Lee darts onto the screen as Mookie, delivering a pizza (of course). It?s a sly little Hitchcockian cameo, but it also offers a slight commentary about what happens to the people who grow up in these neighborhoods (they never leave, their lives never change) while creating a parallel between Mookie-qua-director, and little Flik, who spends most of the film walking around with an iPad 2, capturing ? and watching ? the world through the screen.
Red Hook Summer is filled with little ideas like this one, visual cues and associations. That?s one of the reasons why the film can feel disjointed, unfocused, and half-done. But despite its scatter-shot vernacular style, coolly unpolished, Lee?s film is shot-through with the director?s preternatural sense of voice and place. We feel the sweltering heat of the street and we know these vaudevillian sideshow characters ? from the drunk church deacon to the wheelchair bound sister to the rapping, bullying street tough. This swirling of personality sets the stage for the film?s two main storylines. The first involves the initial friction between the suburban-raised Flick, and the zealous Bishop. Flick has no time or patience for God; he wants to be a kid. The bishop moves on him with fervent tenacity, forcing him to work long hours cleaning the little dinged-up church, attend services, and change his diet. Meanwhile, Flick befriends a young girl in the church, Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a charming little fireball who has grown up in the church and feels the strings of her fidelity to its message loosening.
Red Hook Summer?s achievement as a dramatic piece comes through our shifting sense of sympathy towards the contradictory character of the Bishop, and it is just as we begin to love the man for his foible-ridden idealism that Lee throws the movie?s biggest curveball. Peters is magnanimous and infectious in the role, and he does most of the film?s heavy lifting. The script, too, is a kind of star, creating vignettes that seem to interrupt the action with long soliloquies or dialogues by the main players. In these speeches we encounter the source of tension that heats this world, from urban poverty to gentrification, from disillusioned politics to the powerfully transforming forces of pop culture. Lee is famous for his outspokenness, but there is nothing heavy handed in Red Hook Summer. Rather we approach ideas of faith, life, and love with a raw intensity and unfettered honesty.
Red Hook Summer is by no means a perfect film, and it doesn?t have the same full-bellied vigor as that other?sweltering?summer film, Do The Right Thing, but it is a bold and a rare one, a movie that knows its world and its people, and more importantly, a movie that has something to say and finds the shuffling means to get its point across. What Lee is trying to say, though, is enveloped by the drama, fueled by a shocking and deeply troubling conclusion that takes your knees out. Despite your growing affection for everyone in Lee?s tormented Red Hook, in the end, he leaves you with nowhere to stand.
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