On Film

...Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren are displayed, he protests, but no Michael Jackson, no Jesse Jackson...

...Gratified by the carnage, Smiley pins the pictures of Malcolm X and Dr...

...Those efforts, usually labeled "docudramas," have unfortunately set the standard for the cinematic treatment of troubling subjects...

...Small details pile up and weave the film's dense texture...

...Nevertheless, on this most sweltering Saturday an argument over a trivial matter erupts in Sal's Famous Pizzeria that will lead to the day's violent climax...

...If anything about Do the Right Thing strikes me as utterly perfect, it is the title...

...Is Sal being courtly or seductive...

...White viewers are reminded that an affair between a black and a Hispanic is also interracial...

...It is not too difficult to imagine Do the Right Thing adapted for the stage, the members of Lee's ensemble acting out their frustrations within a big unit set bristling with tenement tensions...

...the attack has no reference point...

...Spike Lee, unafraid of losing sponsors, does not play this game...

...Sadly, Lee presents this Asian ethnic group as a cultural imponderable, the "other" whose special trouble with English, astonishing commercial enterprise, unflagging tenacity, etc...

...That vicious fight, when it finally occurs, becomes a free-for-all involving Sal, his sons and an angry mob, which brings the mostly white and openly hostile police to the scene...

...Or to smash the tablet to bits...

...It is an orgiastic moment of absurd let-it-all-hangout hostility intended to defuse the audience's own anger, artfully provoked during the film's first half...

...The occasionally deserved but mostly undeserved insults received by Mookie, the pizza delivery boy (portrayed by Lee himself), are refractions of the film's prismatic point of view...

...Here is where Lee really pours on the heat, making everything that subsequently happens foreshadow the slugout between Sal and Raheem...

...At such moments Lee enters regions films rarely approach...

...arouse suspicion and resentment...

...Mookie, for example, is not pleased that Tina's mother, who considers him a bum, rants at him in Spanish as she babysits her grandchild...

...But Sal's world has been turned upside down...

...It's bad enough his name is Hector...

...At first, Bugged Out's call to boycott Sal's is ignored by the people in the street...

...In a manner that reminds one of John Sayles, another iconoclast who tells unfashionable truths about controversial issues, Lee scorns the achingly earnest style of features like Mississippi Burning and television's "social problem" packages...

...But like the film it graphically lays bare the reality of a choice that has long faced poor urban blacks: Fight the powers that be peacefully or with violence...

...In one of Do the Right Thing's funniest scenes, characters representing most of the city's main ethnic and racial groups face the camera and, one at a time, attack each other by spitting out the vilest slurs imaginable...

...Consequently, commercial filmmakers feel compelled to ignore almost everything that does notsomehowuplift, entertain or blandlyinform...

...The cast of Lee's drama actually plays it as if the script were blank verse set to an inner rap beat that regularly bursts through to the surface...

...No getting around it—it's nasty...

...They grew up on my food," says Sal, tired but still proud after 25 years on the same block, behind the same storefront...

...At that Lee succeeds...

...Their voices raised in contrapuntal chatter, what comes most naturally to these folks is mouthing off at each other, to the beat of music, music, music...

...Most movies by independent filmmakers have an offbeat quality and Lee retains much of the flip, seemingly improvisational tone of maverick works (including his own She's Gotta Have It...

...The chip has been made even heavier by Sal's refusal to serve him unless he keeps the deafening noise turned off...

...This underscores how shallowly drawn the Korean grocer and his wife are, and that Lee did not construct a personality for them because he naturally assumed their real-life counterparts lacked one...

...The center of this turbulence is the local pizzeria, run by the conspicuously white Sal and his two sons from the not-too-distant Italian enclave of Bensonhurst...

...At this extended floating moment, with the camera focused expectantly on Sal, one feels further violence can be avoided if he says something conciliatory, echoing the neighborhood's outrage over Raheem's death...

...His performance isso vivid that it is hard not to assume he agrees with his character that the destruction of Sal's store is the symbolically apt response (the "right thing") to whites' abuse of blacks...

...Evenlwas at first taken aback by the film's aggressive rap theme song, "Fight the Power," performed by Public Enemy and danced by Rosie Perez under the credits...

...with some qualification it could be called a musical featuring extended dialogue and one riot...

...Then—a riot and the pizzeria is wrecked...

...A complaint by Bugged Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a vain big-mouth, about paying more for extra cheese quickly escalates into a gripe over the absence of "brothers" on Sal's "Wall of Fame...

...A pair of quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X pointedly appears just before the closing credits...

...Wade fretted so anxiously over equal-time representation that you might have thought it was a dramatization of FCC guidelines...

...Mookie, until now the cooling voice of mediation, very calmly and deliberately seizes a garbage can and (after politely removing the plastic bag inside) heaves it through Sal's large plate-glass window...

...Spike Lee's rich, intense film has the effect of shrewdly holding up a blank slate to the face of racism...

...But there are no J ews in the movie...

...His slice of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant—once an Italian community, now predominantly black and Hispanic—is a raucous, fibrillating urban machine whose many moving parts are its underclass inhabitants constantly caroming off each other...

...To his credit, Lee keeps stressing the point that such harmful attitudes come in unexpected varieties...

...But could Lee in good conscience have put himself in the role of anyone other than the film's most controversial figure...

...On Screen POLYPHONY OF PREJUDICE BY JOHN MORRONE In Do the Right Thing Spike Lee returns to the setting of his 1983 short feature, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, and offers a stylized look at 24 hours in the life of an impoverished inner-city neighborhood...

...So Spike Lee is prone to racism, too...

...Street Scene, though distant, is a direct antecedent...

...One could argue that this lapse in the script appropriately reflects one of the film's main themes: When pushed we're all of us just a little prejudiced...

...Lee's portrayal of the two Korean greengrocers who have a store across the street from Sal's is as unfortunate as the attitudes he wants to expose...

...He says nothing...

...Its frame of time and place has a classical unity, and its jigsaw-puzzle precision is almost Hitchcockian...

...Later, Mookie is none too thrilled by the attention Sal pays Jade, the comeliest girl on the block, when she saunters in for a slice...

...Both of these responses, albeit unsurprising, I think ultimately miss the film's balance and detachment, have failed to catch its intimation of hope beneath all the cruel bigotry...

...he has been beaten up and suddenly repulsed by the people who for half his life had coexisted with him in peace...

...There is no question about it for Mookie, whose face shows a rage usually associated in the popular mind with the reaction of white men who notice "their" women being eyed by blacks...

...Do the Right Thing offers no apologies for its savage polyphony ofvoices...

...He leaves it up to you to write a message of peace...

...While the fictional lives Lee has created are distinct, crisp and complementary, the street (the corner of Lexington and Stuyvesant Avenue, to be exact) is the real main character and unifying element of the plot...

...Indeed, many whites have perceived Do the Right Thing as an endorsement of the kind of "justified" violence advocated by Malcolm X. At the same time, a number of blacks have protested the absence of any positive images of black inner-city dwellers...

...Whether inadvertently or not, they strangle Raheem while restraining him...

...Speak English...

...Music—rhythm-and-blues, rap, reggae, soul—wakes the people of this neighborhood every hot summer morning and, punctuated by the endless patter of DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy, keeps them company as they make their way through a day of fights, chill-outs, domestic fracases, idle street gossip, and spells of dozing...

...It gains supporting muscle when he joins up with Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), the area half-wit who hawks photos to passersby of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), the belligerent carrier of a boombox equal in size to the chip on his shoulder...

...Yet this latest offering is deeply indebted to traditional storytelling...

...Do the Right Thing is, in fact, a kind of pulsing fugue...

...Half supported by his flashy, no-nonsense sister Jade (played by reallife sister Joie Lee), he is called a bum by his Hispanic girlfriend Tina (Rose Perez), who has borne his son, nudged and needled by Sal (Danny Aiello) the pizzero, who would like to get a little work out of him, and repeatedly made a scapegoat by Sal's older son Pino (John Turturro), who resents his obligations to his father, the restaurant and Bed-Stuy with a virulent racist rage...

...If Mookie is not particularly attached to Sal or his pizza, the neighborhood is...

...Welaughnervously, butlaugh nevertheless at ridiculous expressions like "spearchucker," "slanty-eyes," "garlic breath," "manana-man," and so on...

...This kind of "neutrality, " of course, is no more than a strategy for covering one's behind...

...The Korean comes last, spewing anti-Semitic insults...

...The large crowd of onlookers and the participants in the brawl are stunned...

...Recall how television's recent Roe vs...

...Even that riot, the cause of much of the controversy surrounding the film, does not disrupt the production's formal orderliness...

...King to the coveted wall...

...Prejudice against Koreans is frequently as comfortably tolerated as the yuppie novel caricatures of feckless Gulf State millionaires hobnobbing on Rodeo Drive...

...In casting himself as Mookie, Lee has taken an enormous risk...

...For were you to ask 20 different people swept up into the kind of extreme social situation enacted here what should be done, 10 would choose one path and 10 would choose the other...

...Ironically, the movie does have a serious flaw that has been overlooked in the heated debate it has stirred...

...It seems to be his way of emphasizing his responsibility for a movie that starkly represents a large spectrum of racial, ethnic and religious hatred...

...More recent ones are the performance works by Ntozake Shange and Vinnette Carroll that fuse the call-and-response cadences of traditional gospel conventions with the rhythms of contemporary black poetry...

...he shouts, "I want my son to learn English...