MOVIE REVIEWS : Spike Lee Comes of Age

Under the opening credits of “Do the Right Thing” (citywide), Tina (Rosie Perez), a young, great-looking honey blond in satin boxing trunks and a halter top, punches out a message of sexual aggressiveness steamy enough and serious enough to melt the grommets in your Air Jordans.

Working to the song “Fight the Power,” she pouts, jabs, double-punches and, for a little emphasis, puts her boxing gloves behind her head and tosses off a series of hip thrusts vicious enough to pop contact lenses in the back row.

She’s sexy and she’s funny about it. She is also writer-director-producer Spike Lee’s way of putting us on warning: People are mad here. Watch out.

The deliberate stylization of her number, shot against rear projections of Brooklyn streets and brownstones, and its electrifying intensity says something else: This is a director working with absolute assurance and power. This stylization carries over to the body of the film; Lee has cleared out his scene of anything extraneous (including, as many have already noted, drugs), the better to concentrate on the larger issue at hand, which is racism. That would seem to be his choice to make.

Spike Lee has never lacked confidence. “She’s Got to Have It” and “School Daze” radiated a cheeky bravado that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t quite cover weak performances or shaky artistic choices. But the leap he has made here--as a writer; working with his actors, and directing a molten flow of action--is phenomenal. “Do the Right Thing” announces the coming-of-age of an important film maker with something urgent and uncomfortable to say.

Lee’s intent is no less than a behind-the-scenes guide to a racial conflagration; an epic portrait on a block-square scale, one small neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. If Lee’s vehicle is humor--quick, light, knowing, even loving--it’s a humor he uses cathartically.

On the hottest day of a hot summer and against this faintly surreal backdrop, which seems to intensify the furnace-like glow of the day, Lee has created at least four ages of this Bed-Stuy community. There are the Elders, Ossie Davis’ proud, alcoholic “Mayor” and Ruby Dee’s Mother Sister, unrelated but mother and father figures to much of the neighborhood. (Lee’s use of this magnificent pair of director-actors can also be seen as an homage to a great earlier generation of black film making.)

Next are the three Corner Men, perennial onlookers somewhere in their 50s, one of whom (rumbling comedian Robin Harris) rejoices in the name “Sweet Dick Willie.” Jobless but never opinionless, these three wrangling sideline quarterbacks, who pass around some of the movie’s most pungent lines, form a sort of hilarious chorus.

Then there are the young men, the hysterically confrontational Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), and the silent giant Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) with his maddening boom box. There is a second chorus of youngsters, four watchful teen-agers whom Lee’s script calls The Posse, and a passel of kids, from Tina’s baby to an 8-year-old boy, crucial to the action. And there are three daily commuters. When Sal (Danny Aiello, working with masterly shading and complexity) built Sal’s Famous Pizzeria some 25 years ago, this was an Italian neighborhood. Now it’s mainly black, with some Latino families such as Tina’s; Sal’s Famous is a landmark, and Sal and his sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson) drive in to work every day from all-Italian Brownsville.

Folding in and out of the action is Mookie, pizza-deliverer to the neighborhood, father of Tina’s baby son, watchful, likable but not admirable. He’s too cantankerous and too flaky for that, living week to week, running out on his obligations to Tina and their son, rooming for free with his sister Jade (Lee’s actual sister, Joie). However, Mookie is played by Lee himself, and by the force of Lee’s personality he becomes someone we care about. It makes his part in the film’s last quarter hour both painful and deeply disturbing.

Yet it touches on the film’s prickly core. With the possible exception of Sal’s purely racist son Pino and an overzealous New York cop with a fatally bad attitude, the film has no clear-cut villains. It has flawed, complex human beings, almost none of whom do the right thing all the time. Lee is not advocating violence, nor does his masterly cameraman, Ernest Dickerson, revel in it cinematographically (not the way “Mississippi Burning” did). Mother Sister’s dreadful scream in the glow of her neighborhood in flames is a sound from the heart of the film makers.

What Lee is showing is a series of abrasive incidents, trivial by themselves that, combined with soaring heat and in a climate of oppressiveness, finally ignite. In fact, Lee suggests that the actual point from which the fury builds is petty, if not ridiculous: Buggin’ Out’s demands that Sal put a few black faces up there with Sinatra, Pacino, DeNiro and DiMaggio in the pizzeria’s fly-specked, Italian-American wall of fame. And Lee makes it clear that Buggin’ Out’s proposed boycott gets no support anywhere in the community until, by accident, he hooks up with the one person nursing a grudge against Sal.

Lee’s point is that, like the Howard Beach tragedy in New York or the case of Vincent Chin in Detroit, what follows comes from a mixture of fear, sociology, economics and feelings buried so deep that those who carry them would deny they exist.

And in that context, the two quotations Lee has chosen to close his film--lines from Martin Luther King on the immorality of violence, others from Malcolm X describing violence in self-defense as intelligence--hang there, reflecting choices to ponder.

As he has in three past films, Spike Lee is commanding people to wake up--not only the black community but all of us--before we are over the brink. Since its Cannes unveiling, “Do the Right Thing” (MPAA-rated R for language) has stirred up impassioned debate everywhere; it would seem the greatest compliment that could be paid a stunning entertainment.

‘DO THE RIGHT THING’

A Universal Pictures release of a 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks production. Producer, writer, director Spike Lee. Co-producer Monty Ross. Line producer Jon Kilik. Camera Ernest Dickerson. Editor Barry Alexander Brown. Music Bill Lee. Production design Wynn Thomas. Costumes Ruth Carter. Sound design Skip Lievsay. With Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Bill Nunn, John Savage, John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Robin Harris, Frankie Faison, Paul Benjamin, Joie Lee, Sam Jackson.

Running time: 2 hours.

MPAA-rated: R (younger than 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).