A Damn Good Time
Well, I can’t say it wasn’t entertaining. Spike Lee is one of those guys who just knows how to make a movie. He’s a Filmmaker with a capital “F”, and when he puts out a movie, you know that it will, at the very least, be a damn good time.
BlacKkKlansman is the latest damn good time put out by Lee, and, as far as entertainment value goes, it does not disappoint. The (ostensibly) true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is a suspenseful, funny, sad, and uplifting story with a nice, albeit familiar moral. It’s the kind of story where the good guys are clear, the bad guys are clearer, and everyone gets what they deserve. And when the bad guys are hardcore racists, watching them get their just deserts can be quite satisfying. The entertainment factor is elevated by great performances throughout the picture. While each actor was quite competent, Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman and Topher Grace as David Duke were the two that stuck out to me the most.
It’s always nice to sit and watch a damn good film but sometimes that’s just not enough. The really dissatisfying thing about BlacKkKlansman is that Spike Lee is known for making films that are much better than “damn good”, and this just wasn’t. Given the heavy-handed political messaging of BlacKkKlansman, it’s clear that Lee meant for this to be a powerful, moving story about social justice and modern racism, and while it does have powerful, moving moments – an earlier scene featuring a public speech by civil-rights advocate Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) comes to mind – the film as a whole gave pretty mixed, and possibly even negative messages.
Most of my problems with the messaging of the film boil down to its portrayal of racism. Not the KKK, mind you; I thought that Lee did a fantastic job of showing the absurd and irrational nature of white supremacy. But rather, the racism that occurs within the police force. It’s 2018 dammit! I think we’re all ‘woke’ enough to know that the police aren’t the batch of fine dandies we see on TV, especially when it comes to racial tensions. While BlacKkKlansman doesn’t wholly ignore police racism, it does put it all on the shoulders of one ‘bad cop’, whom everyone knows is racist, but nobody will do anything about it. The film has no interest in discussing the systemic racism prevalent in the police force and instead pretends that it doesn’t exist. And while not every civil-rights film has to be about systemic racism, it feels disingenuous to me to make a movie about racism and the police but ignore the reality of racism within the police.
On top of that, there is the falseness of the story. While it’s impossible to know what truly happened, we do know that the story Lee told is mostly bullshit. It’s hard to talk about it without getting into plot points that you may not want to know before seeing the film. Suffice to say, you’d do well to look into the story behind the story if you’re interested in this one. The fantasy is, at points, so overwhelming that I almost feel as though it would have been better as an entirely fictitious tale which took elements from the “true” life story of Ron Stallworth.
BlacKkKlansman is a wildly entertaining movie, but if you want to watch a forward-thinking political film, just go see Sorry to Bother You.