Chi-raq

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Spike Lee’s latest joint, Chi-Raq, the most exuberant, audacious, urgent film I’ve seen all year. Lee’s films haven’t always charmed me, despite his consistently strong work as a stylist and a social commentator. Perhaps part of the problem is that I’ve never seen them in the moment, until now. Chi-Raq is a modern-day riff on the Greek play Lysistrata, by Aristophanes. With rhyme and verse and music, Lee dramatizes the very real pain and violence rampant in the streets of Chicago, glibly renamed Chi-Raq by residents who live in their own version of terrorism right here on American soil. Spike Lee goes all in with Chi-Raq.

This film is a great big stick of dynamite, destined to offend as many people as possible; it’s both a comedy and a tragedy, a musical, a manifesto, a battle cry, and a lament. The “star” of the film (there are many characters that might share this title) is Lysistrata, played by the radiant Teyonah Parris, girlfriend of an up-and-coming hip hop artist who calls himself Chi-Raq, but without the irony. He embraces the violence, and is one of the gang leaders who live and die by the gun. Lysistrata refuses to see past the façade of fame and glory and music, until several violent attacks hit too close to home. Then she meets Miss Helen, a neighbor who spends most of her time reading. She’s a self-contained social activist just waiting for circumstances to unleash her and call her to action. Miss Helen convinces Lysistrata to do something about the violence, and Lysistrata unites the women in her community, convincing them to go on a sex strike. “No peace, no piece” is their motto, and their decision erupts across the globe as women from every tongue join in the fight against violence by denying sex to their men.

Along the way, we get Samuel L. Jackson, spruced up in colorful suits and a hat, as our emcee, narrating the film with his usual wink-and-a-smile charm and his brash, commanding presence. And we get John Cusack in an unlikely but powerful performance as a white minister of a black church, serving the community he grew up in. Cusack delivers an intense monologue-sermon-eulogy during a funeral for a 7-year-old girl. (She was killed in the midst of a recent episode of gunplay between gangs.) Cusack’s sermon is at times a grand-standing lecture on the statistics of gang violence and racial injustice, at times a riling call to action. Lee is deliberately ambiguous here: The emotionally-driven service is by turns a show-stopper and a place to mourn out in the open, in a community. 

Chi-Raq is in many ways a throwback to some of the more influential work of Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard. In Weekend (an insufferable movie), Godard often pointed the camera at people so they could rant about the evils of capitalism and other assorted topics. Lee uses his camera similarly. Chi-Raq is a really good rant of a movie, but it's more than that. In Chi-Raq, these moments of sermonizing are just part of this movie’s garish, delightful, indignant brio. Lee celebrates the various possibilities of movies, never holding his movie hostage to the constraints of realism or plotting. Some may call it uneven—and there are moments when the film doesn’t totally hang together—but Chi-Raq is ultimately a masterful piece of filmmaking. It evokes extreme emotions, and the performances are big and powerful and in your face.

Angela Bassett's performance emerges as possibly the best in a slew of standout performances. Bassett has such power in her voice, and she commands the screen in every scene she's in. And Teyonah Parris is like a gift from the gods. She's a stunning beauty, she's witty, and like Angela Bassett, she can part the seas with a word or a look. 

Of course, Chi-Raq isn’t for everybody, but it should be. The film's brash discussion of sexual politics and its complicated dissection of racism in America is inflammatory, but that's kind of the point. Moreover, Spike Lee doesn't enshrine his movie in moral rectitude. He's not here to play by the rules or tow any lines, which is why Chi-Raq is a gaudy, messy, blistering movie. And it's alive. So, so alive. Those who criticize Spike Lee for turning the movie into a farce in the second half are missing the point (and missing a bold and wonderful move of a talented director). The mark of a great movie is that it can hold an array of emotional experiences without losing its footing, without compromising its characters or its values. And moreover, that it takes chances where conventional movies play it safe. Chi-Raq blissfully flies too close to the sun, and what a beautiful flight it is.

Sunshine State

Sunshine State (2002) was filmed mostly in Northeast Florida, and it's a kind of living biography of a fictional resort town called Delrona Beach. Writer-director John Sayles has crafted an absorbing, if overlong, movie, headed by Edie Falco and Angela Bassett. They both play women who grew up in the area, and they only have one brief scene together, at the beginning of the movie. But while they barely cross paths during the course of the film, their relationships do connect, from their family members and their friends and neighbors, to the developers who are perched like buzzards, waiting to buy up as much property as they can. The developers want to sell the image of Florida, the Florida of cheap mythology. There are a series of amusing scenes of four retired men playing a round of golf (they bookend the movie), one of whom is an aging investor and developer, who waxes on philosophically about how Florida was marketed to the outside world, and how the developers learned to make the marketing a reality. "Nature on a leash," he calls it.

I have no idea if John Sayles has any real relationship with or affection for Florida (he was born in New York), but he has touched on a number of very real things about how Florida has been marketed over the years to people weary of shoveling snow and enduring bleak, sunless stretches of time. The Florida of palm trees and golf courses and gimmicky alligator petting zoos is not the Florida I know (although those things have always been no more than an hour's drive away). But it is the Florida in most outsiders' imaginations, and finally here comes a movie that looks at the people who have set up roots here, for generations, who seem like natives to the state only because they've been here longer. They're facing pressure to sell, but also pressure to stay, to maintain a bygone way of life that is perhaps now just as imaginary as the faux-Florida imagery.

The characters are richly developed, and the scenes between them build subtly. You won't find the whimsical lightness suggested by the poster (an ironic marketing oversight that mirrors the dishonest marketing of Florida, perhaps?). It's not exactly heavy, either, though. It has a laid-back feel to it. The tone of the movie is casual, even if the characters are dealing with plenty of heavy issues. Sayles is particularly interested and invested in looking at the relationship between the black community, which had carved out a space for itself in the 1940s and 1950s where they could finally breathe, and the white community, which finds subtle ways to maintain a safe distance, but also tramples over civil rights through government regulations and sneaky backdoor deals with the county commissioner's office.

There's one totally implausible scene where Falco's mother (Jane Alexander), an eccentric "impresario" who runs the local community theater, unexpectedly turns into a slick negotiator with the company that wants to buy their businesses (a motel and a restaurant, both of which are in the way of the big developer's plans to reinvent the community). You can't help but snicker at how ruthlessly she takes over the meeting and turns the deal in her family's favor (surprising even her daughter, especially because the investors had pegged her as a non-threat, a woman who's too caught up in voluntary theater projects to worry about numbers and figures). But midway through the scene, you start wonder if this isn't a moment of true hypocrisy, for this artist to suddenly be so interested in profit, and in selling out. She explains that running a non-profit theater has made her business-savvy. You can only buy it because Jane Alexander's performance is so good. Her character's doing a self-adapted production of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and indeed she seems to have come from the pages of a Faulkner novel. (Many of the other characters do as well.)

With Mary Steenburgen, as a local woman who runs an annual parade that tries to promote "local" businesses using every cliched Florida-esque gimmick in the book, from pirate ships and buried treasure to alligator exhibitions. Steenburgen plays it with a sense of aloof devotion. Her character wants desperately to be ignorant of her own irrelevance, but she can't completely convince herself of the lie. Also starring Mary Alice, Bill Cobbs, Timothy Hutton, Ralph Waite, Miguel Ferrer, James McDaniel, Tom Wright, Alan King, Marc Blucas, Alex Lewis, Richard Edson, Cullen Douglas, Perry Lang, and Gordon Clapp.