Do the Right Thing

"My people, my people, what can I say; say what I can. I saw it but didn't believe it; I didn't believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?"

-Mister Senor Love Daddy, Do the Right Thing

A short post again, due to a late start coming down the hill from Canandaigua and a deposition set to begin in a few minutes. A hell of a way to start the week.

Last week I read an editorial in the NYT by filmmaker Spike Lee, reflecting on his and the City's love for the New York Knicks, now in the NBA finals and poised to perhaps win the NBA championship for the first time since 1993. It was the talk of the town while we were there during our magic time.

So I became curious about Spike Lee, one of the most famous filmmakers of our generation. I found a few lists of the greatest of his films, ranked. There have been a bunch of them. But the consensus was that his greatest work was the 1989 film, Do the Right Thing.

Peg and I plunked down our virtual $3.99 on Saturday night and sprawled on the couch in front of the TV for movie night. What we experienced over the next two hours was one of the most amazing, nuanced pieces of cinema I've ever seen. The shots were often disorienting, the visuals of Bed-Stuy in the '80s were so redolent you could almost smell the place. And the characters reminded one of the waves of ethnic groups who've occupied that space, from the lone holdout Italian serving Sal's Famous Pizza from his corner restaurant with his two sons, to the black community that spanned generations, to the ever-growing Puerto Rican community the black neighbors resented as interlopers, to the white guy moving into his brownstone wearing a Larry Bird jersey, an adumbration of the gentrification that makes it such a very different neighborhood today.

There is even what the Russians would call a holy fool, a mentally challenged stutterer who walks the neighborhood hawking photos of MLK and Malcolm X he's marked up with a pen. I thought he really was handicapped, but read later that he was a Yale-trained actor who was nominated for an Academy Award for the role.

I guess what makes the movie worth the watch is that Lee avoids pat answers or any sort of good guys-bad guys moralizing. The characters are just people, with all their faults and virtues. The Italians drop the N bomb; in fact, they all have some colorfully racist things to say about each other (except, of course, the holy fool who wanders through most scenes). The tragedy that unfolds is complicated, the destruction senseless. It's just who we are.

In the end, we just sat there as the credits rolled by, pondering on what we'd just seen. And we came back to it over the weekend, as new insights about what Lee was trying to say bubbled up out of our subconscious. All the mark of a great movie.