Clockers
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN
Richard Alleva
'CLOCKERS': ACTION WITHOUT DRANA
Spike Lee, sociologist
Peck's bad boy makes good. Thaf s the gist of what most critics have written about Spike Lee's Clockers. You can hear...
...Far from coaxing a performance out of this novice, Lee uses him as a punching bag...
...Eventful, yes...
...Strike should have been called Struck...
...The film isn't very dramatic...
...or a mixture of all the above...
...Drug boss Delroy Lindo, referring to his number-one assistant, Strike, as his "sword and staff," makes you hear the voices of the good Baptist folks who were this monster's ancestors and whose Bible language still permeates his gangster talk, and when you see twelve-year-old boys with their headphones plugged into "gangsta rap" outside the boss's headquarters while awaiting his orders and observe how they strut in place to the beat of the music, you get a good idea of how style ushers in violence...
...It's always precise, but whafs especially compelling is the way Lee often snips off a scene a few seconds before a routine director would, then jumps us into the next sequence just a bit past its conventional starting point...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva 'CLOCKERS': ACTION WITHOUT DRANA Spike Lee, sociologist Peck's bad boy makes good...
...The rival dealer is murdered, all right, but by whom...
...The answer startles me even as I give it...
...The superb jazz composer Terence Blanchard has graced the soundtrack with gorgeously melancholic music, though there is a bit too much of it...
...Strike, eager to climb up the ladder of criminal success, plans the murder...
...The hero, Strike, learns at the beginning of the movie that his boss wouldn't mind having another drug dealer eliminated...
...But, no, Strike is the real protagonist, and he is nothing but an anguished blank...
...strut bolsters attitude...
...In My Dinner with Andre, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory sit at a restaurant table, talk, eat...
...the violence of outlaws eventually plagues the innocent...
...But why was my attention wavering so often during Clockers...
...Most startling of all, perhaps, is the portrayal of the chief cop in this movie, Harvey Keitel's homicide detective, as a basically decent man-this from the number-one, cinematic scourge of the N.Y.P.D...
...The filmmaker has endowed his protagonist with the opacity of one of the suspects in a detective story, even though Clockers isn't a detective story but a character study taking place in a criminal milieu...
...Does the perpetual look of anguish on Strike's face signal remorse...
...And the editing is notable...
...Beatings, shootings, interrogations, threats, recriminations abound...
...But real long as we're not speaking of melodrama or farce-isn't defined by external action...
...I'm afraid I can contribute only to the first course...
...an innocent man's bewilderment at being accused...
...song teaches strut...
...For Lee-and therefore for us-the mind of this "docker" seems terra incognita...
...Keitel owns this territory and he struts around in it like a prize bantam...
...No matter how stirring, no matter how laced with Spike Lee's rough poetry, sociology is not drama.ology is not drama...
...No wonder that the fatted calf has been requisitioned and a banquet of praise laid on...
...contempt for law-abiding, upwardly striving blacks by other blacks is deplorable...
...For this story, adapted from Richard Price's novel, about a young drug dealer who finds himself under suspicion for a murder to which his older brother has already confessed, Spike Lee provides an asphalt jungle setting of poetic veraciousness that plunges the viewer into heat, noise, and a sort of becalmed desperation interrupted by violence...
...fear that his brother really did the crime...
...When detectives examine a recently dispatched drug dealer's corpse, their jaded ribaldry does more to portray the obscenity of violent death than any slickly staged murder scene could...
...It's impossible to tell (before the conclusion) because Spike Lee gives us no access to Strike's mind...
...Drama is the ride to revelation, crystallization, epiphany taken by one or more protagonists...
...There are things to praise in Clockers and some of them are artistic as well as moral...
...Violent, certainly...
...Because Lee is great at limning the ghetto environment, we see the cause of Strike's pain all around him...
...Isaiah Washington as the self-accused brother convincingly embodies decency frayed by frustration...
...Probably because the director wants to warn kids about the misery of a drug dealer's life, he isn't content with portraying the hero's spiritual anguish but has him pummeled re-peatedly by a neighborhood cop, pistol-whipped by his boss, roughed up by police drug squads, socked by kids in the neighborhood, jerked about physically and intellectually by Keitel, and even briefly slapped around by an understandably outraged neighborhood mom...
...While Lee's usual cameraman, Ernest Dickerson, always mellowed Lee's movies with a salmon-hued, late-afternoon light, Malik Hassan Sayeed here creates a look dominated by blacks and reds...
...attitude armors kids for violence...
...There's no such inner movement within Clockers's well-orchestrated turbulence...
...The rest of the cast is impeccable...
...There are excellent sequences, written by Price with an ear attuned to the language of the street but not infatuated with argot...
...Nothing else...
...To say that Harvey Keitel plays a furious, foulmouthed but compassionate cop nearly obviates any praise of his performance...
...Poor Mekhi Phifer...
...It's as if Dostoevski had left the murder scene out of Crime and Punishment and then teased us throughout the book with the iffiness of Raskolnikov's guilt...
...When Lee needs a more insolent sound, he switches to rap and cuts his images to that very different beat...
...You can hear the sigh of relief rustling through their analyses...
...But when it comes time to kill, the director skips into the next scene...
...Yet, because you feel how the diners affect each other, how their emotions are shifting, something dramatic transpires...
...nausea at his own moral corruption...
...These slight elisions jolted me alert whenever I felt my attention wavering...
...Ticked off by the in-your-face cockiness of Lee's earlier films and especially by what they took to be the reverse racism and incendiary promptings of Do the Right Thing, reviewers are now expressing gratified surprise at the unambiguous and unexceptionable messages of this movie: selling drugs will turn you into a corpse...
...If Clockers were a detective story, then Keitel's detective would be its true protagonist and we would puzzle out the crime's solution from his point-of-view...
...Delroy Lindo was menacing enough as a crime lord in Malcolm X, but here a coating of paternal benevolence makes him even more frightening...
...I'll deal with Mekhi Phifer in the lead role of Strike in a moment...
...Some of Sayeed's effects are overdone, even hammy, as when his overlighting of an interrogation room threatens to turn the Q&A into a close encounter of the third kind, but he does achieve an overall evocation of night lurching into bleary dawn, a perfect visual rendering of the world of "clockers," those kids so hungry for money and status that they deal drugs round the clock in defiance of law and exhaustion and even the need to go to the bathroom...
...But that's not the same as being taken inside the pain...
Vol. 122 • October 1995 • No. 18
