June 30, 1989 | Throbbing to the beat of a rap-music rant, percolating to the heat of long-simmering rage, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is an audacious and exhilarating film, at once joyous and foreboding, screamingly funny and terrifyingly tragic.
It is as vast and chockablock full of teeming energy and emotional contradictions as life itself. Yet it also is intimate enough to offer a half-dozen or so full-bodied, warts-and-all character portraits of exceptional detail, texture and dramatic truth.
Quite simply, this is a great film. But be forewarned: Very little else about Do the Right Thing is at all simple. In fact, for some audiences, it may be too complex for comfort.
Lee, a 32-year-old maverick who’s probably tired of hearing himself described as America’s leading black filmmaker, has made waves before. He first attracted attention with She’s Gotta Have It, a no-budget, black-and-white erotic comedy that dared to suggest a woman might have a sexual appetite just as hearty as any man’s.
His next picture, School Daze, was a flawed but ambitiously energetic musical drama about bigotry among blacks at a Deep South college, where light-skinned “Wannabes” (as in, “Wanna be white”) feud with darker-skinned students. A lot of well-meaning black leaders did not like that movie, and what it had to reveal about contemporary black culture, at all.
And now there’s Do the Right Thing, a movie that gives us the vitality of urban street life and the viciousness of racism in a single, brightly bedecked, booby-trapped package.
For the first time, Lee has woven a mosaic of many colors, contrasting his basic black with whites, Asians and Hispanics for a look at a very hot summer day in the life on a block of Brooklyn’s lower-middle-class Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Not the least of Lee’s many achievements is his ability to create a vital, compassionately drawn white character: Sal (Danny Aiello, giving the performance of his career), a burly Italian-American whose Famous Pizzeria has been a neighborhood institution for 25 years. Compare this character to the bland black clichés you usually see wandering through the movies of white filmmakers, and you will be even more impressed by Lee’s artistry.
Sal’s Famous Pizzeria is the center of a small, richly detailed universe, where colorful characters react and interact, often with explosively funny results. The Corner Men, three middle-aged black fellows who serve as a funky Greek chorus, sit and watch the world go by. They drink beer, trade insults, swap boasts, and remark on the intrusion of Korean immigrants who are taking over fruit and vegetable stores. In a rare self-aware moment, a Corner Man claims blacks should blame themselves, not only white racism, for their failings. But such serious talk is tiring, and requires another beer.
Among the other folks in the pizzeria’s orbit: Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a grandiloquent neighborhood drunk; Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a brutish-looking young black man who brandishes his blasting boombox like an offensive weapon; Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), the block’s resident sage, philosopher and all-purpose busybody; Pino (John Turturro), Sal’s son and co-worker, a sneering racist who can’t abide the live-and-let-live attitude of his more easygoing brother, Vito (Richard Edson); and Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a would-be activist who wants to know why Sal won’t include photos of blacks as well as Italian-Americans on the pizzeria’s wall.
“You want brothers up on the Wall of Fame?” Sal responds. “You open your own business, then you can do what you wanna do. My pizzeria, Italian-Americans up on the wall.”
“Sal, that might be fine, you own this,” Buggin Out says. “But rarely do I see any Italian-Americans eating in here. All I’ve ever seen is black folks. So since we spend so much money here, we do have some say.”
Both men are right, both men are wrong. As the movie progresses, their petty dispute escalates, igniting a slow-burning fuse that leads to a devastating climax.
Long before that terrible fury is unleashed, there is a sense of impending danger beneath the hugely entertaining panorama of music, movement and moving performances. Lee allows his film to hip-hop gracefully, even defiantly, between heightened realism and a Bertolt Brecht-style anti-realism.
In one riveting sequence, characters of various hues directly address the camera, screaming every racist (and anti-Semitic) epithet in the book. Mister Senor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson), the local disc jockey, tells his listeners they need to chill out — “And that’s the truth, Ruth!” — but the resentments fester.
Later, in a scene that recalls Robert Mitchum’s homicidal preacher from Night of the Hunter, Radio Raheem depicts the battle between light and darkness with his bare hands: One has rings that spell out LOVE; the other, HATE. The image lingers in your mind, then returns with full-screen impact near the end.
So who does the right thing? Da Mayor tries, offering the wisdom and patience of age to younger people not inclined to listen. Sal basically is a decent fellow, quick to admonish Pino for his racist blather, but quicker to pick up a baseball bat when he gets angry. And Mookie, Sal’s cheerfully feckless deliveryman, tries to smother the brush fires when bitterness leads to heated arguments. Lee himself plays Mookie, very well, and makes the young man likable, if not admirable.
But then the cops show up at Sal’s store, a young black man is killed, and Mookie — not some hair-trigger malcontent — responds. A riot ensues. And a tragedy that could have been avoided, isn’t.
Some commentators have accused Lee of glorifying violence in Do the Right Thing. That’s a bum rap. A more serious charge is that Lee’s film is muddled with mixed signals. To a large degree, it is. But the ambiguity, I think, is intentional.
Certainly, Lee doesn’t make it easy for the audience. Many of his black characters have unsympathetic aspects: Radio Raheem is abrasively anti-social, Buggin Out is a grandstanding hothead, Mookie is irresponsible in dealing with his girlfriend and their small child. The movie ends with two seemingly contradictory quotes: From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a condemnation of radical violence; from Malcolm X, a claim that violence in “self-defense” against racism is justifiable.
But what happens at Sal’s isn’t really self-defense: It’s an impulsive, impassioned assault at the only available target that might represent the white power structure. The rage is impotent, misdirected — and, for a harrowing moment in time, intoxicating.
