Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN IMPROBABLE BLUES LEE'S 'MO' BETTER BLUES' In some works of art, we encounter ambiguities that can trouble us into an awareness of the mystery of life. But sometimes ambiguities are bred...
...Mama Indigo does protest that Junior should practice, but this time Papa prevails...
...The conflict between the demands of the heart and the demands of career is a valid subject for dramatization...
...He looks like a genius because Denzel Washington (in a fine performance) endows Bleek with the cool concentration of a master surgeon...
...In any case, Bleek's fury at the gangsters leads to his own pulverization, and the beating wrecks the trumpeter's embouchure (adjustment of mouth to mouthpiece...
...Little Bleek, hating every note he blows, keeps on practicing...
...the way racist words find their way into the mouth of a nonracist) didn't make for effective riot-mongering...
...What impressed me most about the film was what Lee's accusers conveniently overlooked: the white characters were created by this angry black filmmaker with as much sympathy as, and more complexity than, the black roles...
...So, again, why doesn't he fire the egregious Giant...
...Surely, it's clear she doesn't want commitment from him but a boost to her career...
...Baloney...
...But in that film Scorsese so fully dramatized the relationship between the decent, conscience-ridden Charley and the sociopath Johnny Boy that we understood very well why Charley was unable to cut himself off from his very inconvenient buddy...
...And Do the Right Thing didn't provoke riots...
...The ambivalencies on display in Do the Right Thing (the love of bigoted white kids for black performers...
...RICHARD ALLEVA RICHARD ALLEVA...
...But sometimes ambiguities are bred by, and can only deepen, confusion...
...Bleek protests that he hates the trumpet and loves baseball...
...Bleek's proposal to Indigo, the climax of the movie, is shot and edited so haphazardly that it looks as if a roving cameraman had stumbled upon a courtship in a hallway...
...Working with a shoddy script, Lee has made a movie that shows his genius-hero able to find true happiness only through the loss of the very art that exercised his genius...
...Bleek's father, a former ball player, agrees-"Why don't you let the boy be a boy...
...The marriage ceremony is a glorious outdoor reunion photographed in golden tones like wedding pictures come to life...
...Now she's being sped to the delivery room and don't think that Bleek is the squeamish sort who paces the waiting room...
...The movie begins with some neighborhood kids standing outside the apartment of their friend Bleek and yelling up to him to come out and play baseball...
...indicates that only bad timing has brought Giant low...
...Is another little genius being doomed to musical greatness...
...A perfect cinematic specimen of each of these two types of ambiguity can be found in Spike Lee's last two movies: Do the Right Thing and Mo' Better Blues...
...Martin Scorsese (Spike Lee's film school mentor) took this very problem as one of the themes of his first major film, Mean Streets...
...Yes, in real life, even future virtuosi have wanted to get away from the drudgery of practice but, sooner or later, the quest for perfection begins...
...But what Spike Lee neglects to do is to show his characters moving toward health and stability in a believable and dramatically gripping way...
...Why can't he join his pals...
...And I hope that he will take off his smile button long enough to tap the bitter, Rabelaisian, and deeply compassionate vein from which issued Do the Right Thing...
...Guess again...
...Indeed, when one of Bleek's rivals promises help, she sleeps with him...
...The result is vertigo in the viewer instead of comprehension of the mounting anger...
...Fruitless ambiguity number three...
...He's got the gown and the mask on, he's in the delivery room, he's helping Indigo with the deep breathing, now the baby is coming out, the cord is snipped, it's a boy...
...Several more birthdays...
...And now some pals are outside yelling for their chum to quit practicing so that he can play ball with them...
...A shaky union destined to collapse...
...A noble and meritorious list, to be sure...
...Even the one irredeemable bigot, Pino, was made understandable...
...Baby's first birthday...
...Lee's directorial technique is messed up as badly here as Bleek's mouth...
...Mo' Better Blues won't either...
...Do the Right Thing was so full of ambiguities that it could be denounced by social commentators both on the right (Richard Grenier in the Washington Star) and on the left (Murray Kempton in New York Newsday) as irresponsible and even incendiary...
...Danny Aiello's Sal was the best written and played American movie character of 1989...
...Lee does nothing to hint at the roots of Bleek's genius...
...The scene has no rhythm, no build...
...Lee doesn't explore Clark's contradictions...
...Indigo is blissfully pregnant...
...What we are shown constantly is Bleek's intolerance for anything that stands in the way of his career...
...Debt-collecting thugs catch up with Giant and administer a terrible beating, recorded by Lee in gloating, grisly close-up, with amplified thuds...
...It's Dark Night of the Soul Time for our hero: hospital, soul-searchings, a failed comeback, the loss of Clark to his rival, and then...Bleek is at last ready to commit himself...
...In fact, his new movie is confusing and bespeaks a momentarily confused creator...
...But how are we to believe that big Bleek is now a jazz genius after we saw that little Bleek wanted so desperately to swing not with a band but at a ball...
...Happy ending...
...This movie endorses (in ascending order of importance) sexual fidelity, respect for one's parents, responsible parenting, family unity, and baseball...
...Oh, oh...
...The boy gets outside, leaving his trumpet behind...
...I had my own reservations but felt that the film was a brilliant anatomy of how racism can anesthetize the moral sense and the common sense...
...Bleek plays like an angel but is a devil with women, carrying on simultaneous affairs with Indigo, a sweet schoolteacher, and Clark, a would-be singer who is as ambitious and egocentric as her lover...
...The conclusion of this movie is a lightning tour through conjugal bliss...
...It's twenty years later and Bleek is grown up and blowing that trumpet in a night club and-zounds!-the lad has become a genius...
...And he sounds like a genius because Terence Blanchard of the Branford Marsalis quartet is doing the trumpeting on the soundtrack...
...How could it...
...Bleek, Jr...
...Bleek's manager, Giant (a nickname given to the runt played by Lee himself), quarrels with Bleek's sidemen, is incompetent at financial negotiations, gambles with the band's earnings, and then begs the players for loans to pay his debts...
...He proposes to Indigo and is accepted...
...Bleek's fellow players clamor for Giant's dismissal, but Bleek-ruthless, selfish, career-obsessed-can't bring himself to fire Giant...
...Who says that Spike Lee isn't a mainstream American filmmaker...
...Are you kidding...
...Fruitless ambiguity number...well, I've lost count...
...This guy is a walking advertisement for the Lamaze method...
...But Bleek's mother wants her son to stay in and practice the trumpet...
...Mo' Better Blues is full of dramatically fruitless ambiguities...
...Fruitless ambiguity number one...
...but Mama prevails...
...Fruitless ambiguity number two...
...Nowhere in Blues do we see what it is in Giant that makes Bleek so uncharacteristically forbearing...
...The way the beating (in an alley outside a nightclub) is intercut with Bleek (inside the club) blowing away suggests that Bleek's concern with his craft has made him oblivious to the pain of his friend, but, seconds later, Bleek is in the alley and his apparently sincere protest to the gangsters-"I would have gotten you your money in a couple of days...
...Not to worry...
...I hope that Spike Lee will give his next script a good rereading before committing himself to production...
...A marriage to fill the gap made by his artistic impotence...
...Is it too much to ask of Lee that he provide some point of transition...
...the mingled awe and resentment some blacks feel toward other people "of color" who open successful businesses in black communities...
...Cut...
...By the time the climactic riot broke out, we knew exactly why Moogie threw the garbage can through Sal's store window, yet could not applaud violence visited upon human beings we had come to understand as well as we understood Sal and his sons...
...Is it because Giant was one of those childhood pals screaming for Bleek to come out and play ball...
...He shoots a quarrel between Giant and band members by panning back and forth from one shouting face to another...
...is being given a horn...
...Very well...
...But, though it's believable enough for the schoolteacher to complain of Bleek's unfaithfulness, why does Clark mouth the identical accusations...
...Or does Spike Lee, himself the son of musician Bill Lee (who composed much of the music for this film), really think that if Mom yells loud and long enough, the muse Euterpe simply capitulates and touches little fingers and lips with irresistible genius...
...Is Bleek ultimately responsible for Giant's undoing...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 16
