Movies are at their best when they are about something, at least to me. A great story on the big screen that has something to say can be more powerful than almost anything, which is why I’m so glad Spike Lee continues to make movies. Lee’s insistence on saying something powerful and necessary can lead to amazing films, like his new one, BlacKkKlansman.
This movie is about the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, Denzel’s son), the black man who successfully got membership into the Ku Klux Klan. Stallworth simply calls a personal ad by the KKK, and convinces them to let him go to a Klan meeting. Stallworth obviously cannot go himself due to his skin color, so he convinces fellow Colorado Springs cop, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to be the real “Ron Stallworth” at the meeting. The two work together to work their way up the ranks and uncover some nefarious plots that even go as high as David Duke (Topher Grace), the Grand Wizard of “the organization.”
Regardless of whatever film he’s doing, Lee is a master at injecting humor over a scene of hate or grotesque behavior to make the audience nervous laugh at what’s going on. The opening scene features Alec Baldwin flubbing lines on a white nationalist recruitment video, dropping you instantly into Lee’s point of view. In BlacKkKlansman, the N word is used ONLY by white people, and with the hard -ER at the end, a tough cringy listen. However, much of the use of this word is at a friends BBQ. Or over the phone on a friendly chat. These conversations are HORRIFIC slanderings towards African-Americans, but because they are delivered politely, you can’t help but laugh a little bit. The best example is this sweet Klansman couple, Felix (Jasper Paakkonen) and his wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson). They are in bed, having a sweet loving conversation…about how Connie is excited to murder some black people. Lee’s point obviously is that rhetoric looks scary, but moments like these are where most of the bigotry is happening…in normal day to day life.
That’s the main point of many inside of a great Spike Lee story. The infiltration of the KKK by a black man certainly raises lots of very important questions that Lee intends to showcase. Other than casual racism, the concept of a Cause vs. a Job is well studied: Ron Stallworth treats this case like a cause, but it’s more of a job for Flip, who’s worried he’s gonna be put too far into harms way. The best tension in the story is when Flip and Felix butt heads, forcing Flip to improvise on the spot to keep his identity secret. On the other side, Ron starts to date a beautiful college girl named Patrice (Laura Harrier) who believes her Cause of outing the “racist” police system goes against Ron’s Job of reforming it from the inside. Both sides make valid points, and Lee’s conclusion is that both are probably necessary. Like all Spike Lee films, there’s plenty of preaching going around too that certainly snaps you into attention. Corey Hawkins gets to deliver a great angry speech about how oppressive life is in America for African-Americans, as well as Harry Belafonte delivers a heartbreaking speech about how persecuted blacks where while David Duke gives a speech about how “persecuted” whites are becoming, one of the best edited sequences in the movie. While some of this proselytizing is a little on the nose (one speech about how America will never elect a racist president, for example), there’s no denying that Lee conjures up through this story a myriad of powerful anger, emotions, and righteous indignation that few can match in filmmaking today.
BlacKkKlansman ends with footage from the White Nationalist March in Charlottesville Virginia, and Donald Trump blaming both sides for the violence. Again, even though Lee is hammering home his point about how these attitudes exist and need to be confronted, it’s still very haunting to see how recently attitudes like this still prevail in the United States. Lee ties BlacKkKlansman’s story into today with this footage, creating a link and pattern people have maybe never seen before. And also cementing how Denzel Washington’s son is gonna be a force in movies in the future.