1989 remains a notable year for movies, one in which we learned that you couldn’t cure Mel Gibson’s case of the crazies, and that Kim Basinger weighed a little more than 108 pounds. The world was introduced to at least two filmmakers who would become unlikely mainstream mainstays: a jolly fat man whose wildly imaginative comedic fantasies would redefine a genre, and a sensitive geek who went and made a damn movie about a guy who videotapes women talking about sex. Finally, it was the year that our angriest black filmmaker achieved mainstream success with a slice of life drama whose climax would have everyone talking and Roger Ebert crying.
None of these movies sniffed the Oscar. The nominees for Best Picture, please…
“Driving Miss Daisy”: Morgan Freeman’s performance approaches greatness, and I’d love to go to bat for a movie filmed and set in Atlanta, but like “Batman,” the movie may have won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1989 but it feels like a relic.
“Dead Poets Society”: Some really great performances, but the ending seems more manipulative the older I get.
“Born on the Fourth of July”: Stunning, great film. Nolte nails it here.
“My Left Foot”: I know that I really loved this movie when it came out, especially Daniel Day Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance, but I have never felt the desire or need to see it again since.
“Field of Dreams”: A tricky one. The premise is goofy, the movie is corny, but…(continued below)
What Should’ve Been Nominated
“Field of Dreams”: …if you get on board with it, the movie grabs you and you forget that you’ve bought into something goofy. And when Ray says to his dad, “You wanna have a catch,” and you don’t tear up, you are either a woman or a soulless robot. Or both.
“Born on the Fourth of July”: Again. Nolte. Seriously.
“Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”: Easily the most fun movie of the year. Distant second, “Lethal Weapon 2.”
“When Harry Met Sally”: The template for the modern romantic comedy? I think so. Shout me down below.
“Do the Right Thing”: And here’s where I start to step in it. So, to preface: Spike Lee is a loudmouth. A judgmental know-it-all. Racist? I doubt it. Prejudiced? Probably. But this is just about his movies, really only one movie, and so…it’s my pick.
It was one of the most talked about movies that year, from the second it premiered at Cannes, where it lost to Soderbergh’s aforementioned debut because of RAAAAAAAAAAACISM!
Or maybe the Cannes Jury just liked Soderbergh’s movie more. Yeah. Maybe that’s possible.
Set on the hottest day of summer in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the movie examines racial tensions, primarily between African-Americans and Italians, though virtually every race is represented. Lee portrays Mookie, an irresponsible twenty-something who delivers pizzas for Sal’s Famous. Academy-Award nominee Danny Aiello plays Sal, the owner of the shop, who has been in the neighborhood for years. He likes Bed-Stuy, likes the people. His youngest son, Vito (Richard Edson) shares his pop’s affection for Bed-Stuy. Then there’s his oldest, racist son Pino (John Turturro), who tells pop, “I detest this place like a sickness.” It turns out that Pino got Sal’s anger, and Vito got his tender heart. The authentic feel to Sal’s Famous is one of the movie’s many strengths. The entire production design is great, but you can practically smell the pizza. Sal has a Wall of Fame filled with pictures of famous Italian Americans, from Al Pacino to Frank Sinatra.
The story unfolds as Mookie makes his way through the neighborhood delivering pizzas. He’s got a girl, (Rosie Perez), and a kid. The characters are as authentic as they come, and when we meet Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), we sense trouble.
He’s not a thug or a bad guy. He’s a loudmouth, badgering a white guy for stepping on his Air Jordans and for living in his neighborhood. When he complains that Sal should have Black people on the Wall of Fame, Sal tells him, “Get your own place, you can put brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles on the wall.” Buggin’ Out goes on to argue that Sal takes black dollars, so he should cater to the black clientele.
What I continue to love about the movie is the build, the pacing, the characters, the cinematography, the humor, and the varied reactions it provokes — which itself is due to the film’s greatest strength, its ambiguity. While the movie ends with Black people rioting, they are far from the only victims of prejudice. Every race in the movie is revealed to harbor sometimes viciously prejudiced views of another race. Here is what I think Spike Lee gets right in his movies, a fairness that never shows up in his soundbites about, say, Tarantino’s use of the N-word.
The safe and politically correct move would have been to portray Buggin’ Out as some kind of victim. But Lee doesn’t do that. Buggin’ Out is an instigator, and matches Pino’s prejudice and distrust beat for beat, at one point hassling Mookie for hanging out with Vito, “What’s up with the white boy?” Now, if Buggin’ Out is Spike Lee’s surrogate, and given his “stay black” attitude and penchant for NEVER SHUTTING THE HELL UP, he might just be, the character is nothing less than Spike laying bare his soul. Even if Buggin’ Out doesn’t represent Spike’s point of view, it’s an honest character; flawed, desperate for just one person to back his pretty shallow cause.
No one will back him up in his quest to get some “brothers up on the wall” at Sal’s. Most of his neighbors tell him he’s nuts. But then, he learns that Radio Raheem has had an altercation with Sal over Raheem’s loud stereo. “No rap, no music, no music, no music,” Sal barks at Raheem. Raheem joins the cause, and he and Buggin’ Out confront Sal just after closing time.
The question everyone was asking (Lee says only white people asked it, which I think is probably bullshit — I think he reserves honesty for his movies), was “Who did the right thing?” I don’t think anyone did the right thing within the context of the story. It was more varying degrees of wrong. Characters say and do things in the movie, especially at the end, that we wish they wouldn’t say or do. Even if one agrees with Buggin’ Out’s cause, it’s hard to sympathize with his technique. And Raheem’s motivation for the boycott has nothing to do with there ever being a boycott to begin with.
Chris Rock has a bit, stolen from my crazy uncle’s philosophy, where he talks about the difference between “black people” and “you-know-what’s.” As funny as Chris Rock is when he breaks this down, he can’t touch my crazy uncle’s timing, and his accent really brings the humor home. The problem with the bit as a redneck philosophy, though, is that it’s bullshit: my uncle seemed to really be talking about all black people when he said “you-know-whats.”
You-know-what is the game changer in “Do the Right Thing,” causing people who seem to love Sal and who were “born and raised” on his pizza, to turn on him, even though his angry tirade is clearly aimed only at Buggin’ Out. “Oh, so we’re you-know-what’s, now?” one kid responds.
Did this moment reveal Sal’s racism? I don’t think so. I think Sal’s a good guy, human, and flawed, whose buttons were pushed and pushed and pushed. The anger inside him boiled over, and it’s probably something that he would have regretted even if it didn’t lead to the riot in the film.
Is it a liberal film? I don’t think so. It examines race and class issues, but doesn’t offer answers. Spike Lee shows guts in not making the minority characters likable victims who we always want to root for. In fact, in many ways we root for Sal, which is one of the tragedies of the movie. Spike is an outspoken liberal, of course, and while I can agree with him that racism and prejudice is a problem, I suspect we disagree on the solution. He and other liberals believe it’s a problem we can legislate, when in reality it’s a problem inherent in human nature, it’s written on our hearts to distrust anything that’s different. Overcoming such a flaw is a personal struggle, not a societal one.
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