Spike Lee is back in form with his latest film, Chi-Raq, a free-wheeling adaptation of ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy Lysistrata. Recast for the violence-torn streets of modern day Chicago--and spoken in hip modern verse--Chi-Raq is an explosive mash-up of classical comedy, agit-prop theater, and hip-hop music video, and delivers a scorching sermon on the tragic sacrifice of black lives to gun violence in American cities. As a story, Chi-Raq is something of a mess, but that’s partly intended. Rather than present audiences with a tidy, logical narrative, Lee mixes it up and blows classical form to smithereens, which symbolizes the way out-of-control killing has shattered contemporary social order.
The nickname “Chi-Raq” likens Chicago’s rampant street violence to the dangerous living conditions of a Middle Eastern war zone. Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott take this controversial notion—excoriated by Chicago officials—and treat it with imagination. Their version of Chicago is terrorized by two rival gangs, Trojans and Spartans, named for ancient tribes famous for ruinous, long-running wars. Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the sexy girlfriend of Trojan gang leader and rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), is radicalized after a drive-by shooting accidentally kills a young girl. She organizes women from both sides of the fray to demand peace by threatening to withhold sex from their gangsta men until they stop fighting. As the movie’s poster puts it, in impressive economy of phrase: “No Peace, No Piece.” Aristophanes spun this premise into a raunchy farce filled with dirty jokes and actors appearing onstage with gigantic erections, and Lee doesn’t shy away from this side of the material. Horny men and flirty women are staples of comedy, in all time periods and places, and some of Chi-Raq’s humor is pure cartoon: men howling like animals in sexual frustration or ludicrously salivating at the sight of female body parts. All that’s missing is someone's eyes popping out of his head on springs as a woman sashays by.
These moments of comic exaggeration evoke groans as well as laughs, but they create an opening for the film’s exploration of sexual politics. After Lysistrata and her troop of militant women take over the National Guard Armory by seducing the soldiers in charge, a group of angry husbands and boyfriends sneak into the compound to demand their women return home. In answer, the defiant women stage a tantalizing hip hop dance number in skimpy, cleavage-baring outfits, turning the men on while turning them down, rapping out their denunciation of gang war while unwrapping themselves in a (near) naked display of sexual power. It’s more soft core porn than Feminism—women appropriating their own sexual objectification for political purposes is always a two-edged sword, especially when the filmmakers are men—but it makes Feminism’s point despite the exploitative imagery. The men, defeated and shamed, leave the women in peace, their power intact.
It’s not just p-ssy power, either. Lysistrata’s sexual revolution comes as much from the library as from the bedroom. After leaving Chi-Raq, Lysistrata takes up temporary residence with the scholarly Miss Helen (a beautiful performance by Angela Bassett). Miss Helen reads her passages from books about actual sex strikes in African countries torn apart by years of civil war and sectarian violence (a neat way for Lee to justify his use of an ancient text by showing its influence on recent history). Miss Helen raises Lysistrata’s consciousness, and when Lysistrata organizes her movement, Miss Helen follows along, convincing a group of older women friends to join the sex strike and demonstrate in front of the Armory. Acknowledging that the greater source of women’s power is in their minds rather than their bodies is crucial for the film’s credibility. Without it, Chi-Raq would crumble into a parody of the protest cinema it wants to be, its message overwhelmed by sexist insult.
Yet despite this effort, Chi-Raq’s attitude toward women remains clouded. The mentor-student pairing of Helen and Lysistrata has a shadow side in patriarchal culture—the mother/whore dichotomy--which is present despite the film’s serious attempt at depicting female wholeness and solidarity. This is a career-long problem for Lee. His star-making debut 30 years ago was She’s Gotta Have It, an ironic comedy about three men struggling to understand a sexually independent woman. But women have rarely been at the forefront of his movies since then. Chi-Raq tries to reverse that by spotlighting strong, confident women turning the tables on needy, sex-centric men (he could have easily called the movie He’s Gotta Have It). But a single film can’t turn it around for Lee all by itself, and it doesn’t help that he relies heavily on Rap and Hip-Hop cultures, neither of which are known for enlightened thinking on gender roles.
But at least those cultures are on trial, too--everything in Chi-Raq is. Lee isn’t pointing a laser beam of criticism at a single problem, he’s firing a broadside at a whole range social ills destroying urban culture--violence, sexism, racism, corrupt politics, economic disparity, what have you. This is reflected in the film’s eclectic style and frequent shifts in tone: a satiric scene followed by a tragic one followed by a Bollywoodish musical number, and so on. Disparate pieces—songs, skits, speeches, as well as conventional drama—compose the variegated action, which zigzags through a barrage of interruptions from TV news, characters addressing the camera, signage, and occasional screens filled with statistics. One scene is even suspended for a few moments by a freeze frame. By turns hip lecture, vaudeville act, melodrama, faux documentary, rom-com, the film is never at rest, never settled into a predictable rhythm or single genre. From one scene to the next it changes its beat, and its identity.
This discordant approach is appropriate for a depiction of inner city conditions that have deteriorated beyond what the elegant form of classical theater can accurately portray. Only a theater that discards the formal unities can do justice to the world’s actual dis-unities--the inequities in a society busted wide open by racial hatred and violence. Conversely, the film’s total theatricality highlights how grotesque and artificial reality in a world of constant crisis has itself become. Lee updates Lysistrata in time, place, and subject, but more importantly, he replaces classicism with an aesthetics of conflict. Abrupt transitions and jarring cuts disrupt conventional narrative flow, and with it passive viewership, demanding an attentive, engaged audience to witness the injustice going on. The movie gets up in our faces and loudly proclaims its epigraph: Wake Up!
Chi-Raq is deliberately messy, which means it makes some mistakes. Two white authority figures—the mayor (D.B. Sweeney) and the buffoonish Armory commander, Gen. King Kong (Daniel Patrick Kelly), are too ridiculous to be taken seriously as threats to Lysistrata or her movement, let alone symbols of white establishment racism. With clowns like them in charge, the black community should have nothing to fear from white society, which is certainly not what Lee intends to say. The scene in which Lysistrata induces Gen. Kong to strip and be tied to a cannon is the low comedy point of the movie. Kelly‘s performance is so broad it doesn’t mesh the film’s predominantly sharp-tongued, incisive humor.
As the lovers Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, Teyonah Parris and Nick Cannon have obvious physical chemistry, but their relationship never generates much heat. Parris is a strong presence but she’s hampered by a script that, despite putting her at the center of the film, pays too little attention to her. We see Lysistrata loving, dancing, speechifying to other women, and later large crowds, but never alone with her thoughts, never undergoing the change that takes her from arm-candy girlfriend to independent-minded heroine. She’s a striking figure but not a memorable character. Chi-Raq, on the other hand, is given a storyline rich with tragic potential, but Cannon can’t take advantage of it. Lee places the film’s denouement in his hands but his overly introspective performance mimes suffering without projecting any of it onto the screen, and the film’s finale falls somewhat flat as a result.
Bassett, mentioned earlier, exudes dignity and strength in her pivotal role as the aptly named Miss Helen. Instead of inspiring a war, this time Helen inspires a social revolution. The underemployed Jennifer Hudson is sadly wasted as the grieving mother—she’s asked to cry a lot, which she does effectively, but little else. Samuel L. Jackson shines in his literally show-stopping role as Chorus/Master of Ceremonies/Ringmaster, strutting his way across the screen in a series of riotous costumes and giving audiences the lowdown on plot development, historical background, and what fun it is being Samuel L. Jackson.
Ironically, it’s a white actor, Chicago alum John Cusack, who delivers the film's most memorable scene. Cusack plays a priest fighting for social justice in the black community (inspired by real-life Rev. Michael Pfleger of Chicago). At the funeral of the slain girl, he delivers a blistering sermon that accuses gangs, government inaction on gun control, and the nation’s growing income divide of equal responsibility for the tragedies occurring every day on the streets of American cities. As cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera swoops hypnotically around him, he moves from the pulpit toward his congregation (and the movie audience), entrancing all with the eloquence of his grief and outrage over the damning facts. Known chiefly for comedies, Cusack lets out all the stops here, making his dramatic monologue a highpoint of both the film and his career to date. It’s fascinating that Lee gives this scene, the film’s rhetorical focal point, to someone white. He may be acknowledging that white audiences will take angry words about race more seriously from a popular white actor than from any of the film’s African-American stars (or, by extension, from him), but whatever the reason, the surprise works, and Cusack’s offbeat casting pays huge dividends all around.
Chi-Raq’s biggest weakness is that the blending of ancient sex comedy and contemporary Black Lives Matter drama, a ballsy idea, is never completely convincing. Lysistrata is definitely there in the mix, but not always easy to find--sometimes it’s more like Lost-istrata. Other times it’s too assertive, and the amusing but often creaky devices of a very old play reduce tragic current events to the level of vaudeville. Some of what we see on the screen should have spent more time with the scriptwriters and editors, too.
But ultimately, Lee’s film is about making big, bold statements, and Chi-Raq makes them, shouting them from the barricades through a bullhorn. Lee’s career of documenting America’s racial politics hasn’t produced anything this innovative since Do the Right Thing. Combining morality play and erotic spectacle, ancient wisdom and hard truths about today’s world, Chi-Raq is assembled in chaotic fashion to mimic chaos, to mirror the madness of a world spinning out of control with murder and hatred. Lee has never been reluctant to be forward, and we should be grateful. This film's artistry and relevance are the brilliant result.
No comments:
Post a Comment