Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN paste grinning down at black men who must look up at...
...But there are brilliant scenes in the weaker half of Malcolm Bulk Orders: X just as there are duds in the first, successful half...
...The vampire (after all, Transylvania is in class, ethnic, and gender differences-reemerge...
...of Malcolm X is the way it so facilely lends it- Toward the end, Malcolm's farewell to his trusted aid, Earl, self to a four-act dramatic structure, each act cor- is shot in static medium distance, but when the men rise to emresponding to a phase of the black leader's life brace, Lee cuts in three big close-ups that make the parting re(leaving the all-important childhood years to be verberate...
...In dramatic terms, it envelope with $20 stamp) goes for nothing...
...and a liberal senator who is trapped between a man was obsessed by a pig that was played by an elegant young his horror at the invasion and his fear for his son-a nasty dancer, suggesting obsession more than pigginess...
...Slalc...
...In 1990, she and director Mark Wing-Davey took a group might have gone for something more complex than the laughs of actors to Bucharest, where they interviewed people, studied it generated...
...we remember that white amazon of paper and turns him into the firebrand that the public came to know...
...Hungry and in need of Days is fairly simple compared to Mad a protective master (Christopher McCann's reiterated high Forest...
...Address White movie critics have rushed into print to assure white au- City...
...air -~ Elijah-seems a pale rendering of what might have happened, -- Leon R Kass ~iILL for it only reproduces the externals of Malcolm's account in -. •AIp-~~_dYING,_ *"]E SO Daniel Call1h At& Dr19£MSIONS his autobiography without letting us feel his torment...
...The real business of the acts is n one of the most unusual and quietly theatrical scenes something else again...
...And, in his gangster tux and reversals of perception and fortune that are the stuff of high with a cigarette dangling from one corner of the mouth, Denzel drama...
...It cozies up to the audience with its we-all-knowthe revolution and its effects, tried to absorb the atmosphere...
...The whole film has act: Malcolm, now calling himself El-Hajj Malik EI-Shabazz, been well planned but only the first half is vividly felt...
...Was the revolution really a reving, and after the 1989 revolution in Romania) are real enough...
...Act 1: Malcolm Little, alias Detroit Red, sions, and stylizations of facts, at least all those accomplished spends his adolescence gambling, pimping, drug-dealing, and for the sake of economy and poetic force, rather than making stealing...
...2: the convict, whose name is now his prisoner number, is re- But, though there are memorable images throughout the movie generated by his conversion to a homegrown sect of Islam...
...GERALD WEALES 20: 15 January 1993 Commonweal...
...Almost everyone in the play-in so far as they watching the two characters do their blood-sucking mas- are people with more substance than the cardboard cutout of ter/willing slave routine, I saw a metaphor for Nicolas Ceau- President Ronald Reagan that is used in one scene-is greedy, sescu and the Romanians, whom he liked to think of as his loving ambitious, manipulative...
...These characters-like the land they assumed lay beyond the dictator, but a morass of susArchangel Michael, who appears to a priest, and the dead grand- picion and accusation which turns friend against friend, chilmother with whom one of the characters communicates-are dren against parents, lovers against one another...
...we suffer the dark- COMMONWEAL ness of his solitary cell and discover, with him and through his 15 Dutch Street...
...down at passers-by as she proclaims the value of the advertised The ensuing prison scenes have a different sort of power, product...
...we feel his contempt and his lust for his white girlfriend...
...disquieting...
...should have been Dostoevskian in matter and manner...
...But this is a menacriety, the spectacle, and the complex emotionality of the life...
...acters-at least as they were played in the production I saw Perhaps I have given too much space to a single, short scene, at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia-were complete caribut-although Churchill is interested in the overarching sweep catures...
...The playgoers are allied with the satirist here, The result is this play, clearly a Churchill work, but a product never his target...
...don't-we tone...
...The crowd scenes are staged competently (though with no great inventiveness), and Washington continues to score as he conveys his character's rage with an amused iciness that seems to amplify the anger rather than mitigate it...
...They live amid Churchillian reminders that this is not a realistic play although questions not answers...
...Look at any Romania) finds the contemporary chaos particularly congenial newspaper: Mad Forest may be set in Romania, but it is a play for him since no one is likely to pay that much attention to a for our time-any place, any day...
...The movie 18: 15 January 1993 Commonweal continues to move right along but it no longer sears...
...Love, awe, fear, fanaticism, inklings of the supernatural, the tremulousness of faith-a-borning, and the scent of murder-to-be might have converged here and been layered in such a way that the viewer could feel that he was being submerged, little by little, into the depths of character...
...100 copies: $ 50 To put it in a nutshell: while watching the life of Malcolm plus handling and UPS charges the gangster in this film, we are inside his consciousness...
...the setting and much of the action (it takes place before, dur- Who is running the new one...
...ingly impassive Gable...
...Last often labored, gelid, self-consciously noble...
...With Mad piece of goods not needing his concern-who is using his medForest it is easier to keep the big picture in mind...
...Does Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X, encompass the va- Washington is Clark Gable come again...
...The all-important pilgrim- Copies of a Commonweal special age to Mecca where Malcolm underwent a second spiritual con- report on California Proposition 161 version when he discovered that Muslims of all colors could are available from eat, talk, pray, and live amiably together, is factually rendered COMMONWEAL, in this film, but the style of the sequence never goes beyond 15 Dutch Street, that of a well-made travelogue...
...Of those exceptions, the most important are a Grenadan of her plays and in the ideas, usually political, that inform them- woman (the play's only black), sharp of tongue and eye, who I find myself thinking of her work in bits and pieces...
...10018 eyes, the expressive power of words...
...Days is a satire about the American whine, "I'm your dog," provides one of the memorable mo- invasion of Grenada, but its main target is ments in the production), he finally convinces the vampire to not the event itself but the spin doctorstake him, which the vampire does by biting him on the neck, speech writers, White House advisers-who try to find the making him-so far as I know-the first undead dog in vam- right words and video images to make an heroic occasion of pire literature...
...And who would check for teeth marks on the neck...
...In act 1 we get a picture of a society in in Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, a vampire, suavely which people survive by deceit, chicanery, bribery...
...We watch the pageantry of Muslim oratory and Harlem crowds and enjoy copic' ul• the fa,°l•IIANASIA report the figure of stem puritanical magnetism that Denzel Washington Pavmcnl enclosed Bill the presents...
...But noth- Alexander Morgan Ca AT ST-- AKf...
...A few examples: the sort of glinting, moonlight-in-the-gutter poetry we get from The very first shot of the movie shows, looming over a down- classic gangster movies...
...but we never feel what his character feels...
...After menacing the child Malcolm and his family in their Nebraskan cabin, Klan night riders gallop away toward a horiSPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE zon dominated by a moon so huge and low in the sky that it LEE'S 'MALCOLM X' seems as if the white-hooded terrorists must drive their horses right onto it...
...Lee's determines to remain true to the tenets of his faith while suf- head and heart work together in the first section but the second fering the abomination of his former coreligionists (and possi- is entirely a product of the head...
...The play ends with of the more playful doings in Churchill's popular Cloud Nine the wedding of Florina and Radu, but the supposedly happy ocseemed to be...
...of a play understands what is going on and of course has to die in misof hers I saw in London a few years ago, all I remember is that directed shelling...
...Thus, one image paves the way for the adult Malcolm's perception of all 0 ne remarkable thing about the remarkable life white people as "devils...
...The dog is one of the victims of the situation, thrown out s political plays go, Steven Dietz's Halcyon by owners who can no longer feed him...
...Nc' York...
...The scene is funny, in a skin-crawly way, but a tragic farce...
...You don't hire a hipster, no matter how talented, to The long second act, which depends heavily on the interviews, make a movie about Savonarola...
...Midcourse, Spike Lee's film turns from intense psychological melodrama Name into handsome iconography...
...ing to come in the script matches this moment of inspired acting...
...We r jerk away with him from the bullets of his foes...
...Who was responsible for the old regime...
...Act there is a marked difference in achievement between its first 3: Malcolm X (the letter standing for his slavery-obliterated half, retailing the incidents of criminality and reform, and its African name) becomes a minister of Allah and ace evangelist second half of public achievement and private happiness terfor Elijah Muhammad and enjoys the happiest years of his pub- minated by schism and bullets...
...And that something is the unrelenting puritanism formers with American actors...
...skimmed by flashbacks...
...gression, knows how to convey the violence and squalid glamIn short, here is a life marked by those sudden, breathtaking our of Malcolm's criminal days...
...But once Malcolm Little Please send me becomes Malcolm X, we are outside his consciousness...
...Though we hear about the beneficial (Please include a 9 x 12 self-addressed spiritual shock, we never see or feel it...
...And, as the crime lord, Delroy Lindo town black district, a billboard featuring a white beauty leering has the power of an aging yet still feral panther...
...In scenes such as the one in which Malcolm less art...
...And if the depths of torment aren't sounded, neither are the heights of religious fervor scaled...
...So Lee fakes it with stilted charm, conventional spectacle, and staging that is little better than what one sees in TV docudramas...
...To enu- 1000 copies: $200 merate successful and unsuccessful moments does not explain 500 copies: $150 why Malcolm X splits right down the middle...
...They reflect the political and moral confusion casion turns into a free-for-all in which all the old hatredswithin the country...
...Washington has a knack, whenever his Lee has taken just measure of the story and has given it the character is in danger or is about to strike out, of keeping his sweep, the attention to detail, the forward motion, and the sense head very still and letting his eyes go vacant...
...These concerned with the before and after of the Romanian revolu- two characters, particularly the senator, suggest that the play tion...
...Result: a prison sentence of ten years (six served...
...Lip diences that they will find this movie irresistible ("A movie for all 115 people...
...olution or a staged event which allowed the old rulers (minus Nor are these fantasy scenes simply theatrical games as some Ceausescu, of course) to hold onto power...
...With only a few exceptions, the charpeople...
...Later, when Malcolm shows off the "conk" that a pal claustrophobic and isometric, that is appropriate both to the prison has given him to straighten his hair and hopefully asks, "Looks setting and to the rage that first seethes within the hero, then white, don't it...
...bly their fatwa) and finally meeting the death he himself Lee, a bard of street life and a connoisseur of sex and agforesaw and perhaps subconsciously welcomed...
...In the first meeting of prophet and disciple, Washington strikes the right note by approaching his master doubled over in trepidaWHAT !S ~-tion, a true believer nearly crippled by his true belief...
...SCREEN paste grinning down at black men who must look up at her...
...Dietz, unlike Churchill, chooses not to be in the Joint Stock Theatre Group tradition, a collective creation...
...Churchill is ical-school base in Grenada to run a variety of scams...
...Si skel and Ebert...
...corrsrolr:p THE DUTCHn & Vicki Michel Even the scene that should have been the turning point of the Carlos F. Gomez movie-the confrontation over the accusation of lechery against Wily Dec-T-0 S "us...
...At least, until December 1989...
...The scenes between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad (silkily played by Al Freeman, Jr...
...This documentary-style scene is framed by two acts in each of which there is a wedding involvOVERBITE & UNDERDONE ing the same two fictional families...
...Act abrasive material palatable to a mass audience...
...in act 3, cut menacing in his stereotypical black cape, carries on a loose from the unstable stability of a corrupt world in which conversation with a dog, played impressively by a they know the limits of possibility, they find not the promised naked actor on all fours...
...RICHARD ALLEVA is a static affair in which the actors introduce the people for whom they speak and let them tell what they saw, heard, did (or avoidSTAGE ed seeing, hearing, doing) during the few days which brought Ceausescu's reign to an end...
...In the eyes of a four-year-old, these brutal lunatics are transcendently evil, otherworldly, literally lunar...
...of the man...
...The hero even bears a different name And I feel admiration for most of Lee's telescopings, elithrough each phase...
...the second half is often impressive, just as initiate Malcolm's alienation from the Nation of Islam...
...But what they haven't noticed is that L Commonweal 15 January 1993: 19 there is something about Malcolm X that resists the black film- The New York production replaced the original researcher-permaker Spike Lee...
...It is at this point, the emergence of Malcolm X the orator and propagandist, that Spike Lee and the movie run into trouble...
...Angela Bassett is such a good actress that she manages to give Betty a dram of humanity but, much of the time, she falls into the same trap that awaits all actors playing paragons: she aligns her spine and radiates SERIOUSNESS...
...We get to know the char'MAD FOREST' & 'HALCYON DAYS' acters, to check their animosities, their longings, their distress, and to follow the minimal plot in each case (the marriage of Lucia to an American in act 1, the marriage of her sister and her art-student boyfriend in act 3...
...The courtship scenes between Malcolm and future wife Life #f death in California Betty are embarrassingly coy and spiritless, reminiscent of those scenes in Gandhi in which the Indian leader's celibate marriage is depicted as a union between overgrown teddy bears...
...few extra bodies...
...All those camels, all those pyra- New York, New York 10038 mids, all those merchants in turbans duly put in an appearance Telephone: 212-732-0800 while Malcolm, reading a letter home on the soundtrack, reSingle copies: $1 counts his discoveries...
...He and his cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, have quells a rebellion in his burglary ring by forcing a rival to play made images not only memorable in themselves but wonder- Russian roulette with him, Washington helps Lee achieve just fully revelatory of the story...
...The first half is jazzy, merculic and private life until charges of lechery against his leader rial, rambunctious...
...It's the stillness of the epic it must have just to register as entertainment, much before an explosion...
...The basic problem seems to be that Lee's peculiar artistry, functioning beautifully in the portrayal of Detroit Red, ceases to respond, in some fundamental way, to Malcolm X, sword of Allah...
Vol. 120 • January 1993 • No. 1
