Da 5 Bloods
netflixSpike Lee has always been a politically engaged filmmaker, fully devoted to championing the corner of disenfranchised minorities and illuminating systemic injustices. He has been channelling his growing frustrations ever since he picked up the camera, subconsciously desiring for his cinema to rouse the slumbering masses of American society, prompting real change in the country. He encapsulated this complex emotional state very early on in his filmmaking by asking Laurence Fishburne to scream ‘Wake up!’ while ringing a bell and looking directly into the lens of Lee’s camera in School Daze. But it wasn’t enough. The world was not ready to respond to his battle cry. Despite being capable of generating noticeable societal tremors with Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X (whose release coincidentally followed the infamous LA riots), Spike Lee has since remained on the side-lines of the mainstream popular culture.
Now, almost three decades later, the circumstances have changed. The world has polarised and fragmented even more while societal frustrations have slowly crept up to reach critical mass. And, following the immense success of his stranger-than-fiction BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee has been given well-deserved attention and respect. Thankfully, his inner fire has not subsided in the meantime; on the contrary, it has been fortified by a lifetime of experiences and artistic confidence in using the camera as an amplifier for his voice.
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One should not expect Lee’s new joint, Da 5 Bloods, to be an easy Friday night experience. The director is not interested in sugar-coating his political messaging either. The film starts by juxtaposing archival footage from the Vietnam War with scenes of police brutality and race riots. Both were happening simultaneously on American soil while the country was embroiled in a bloody conflict on the other side of the planet. He employs the same technique throughout the film, both to reinforce the historical validity of his mission and to drive the viewers well outside of their comfort zones.
This is achieved with the mirroring of the unforgettable scene from BlacKkKlansman where a re-telling of the infamous lynching of Jesse Washington was intercut with flashes of gruesome photographs=. This way, Lee informs his audience they have purchased a ticket to a thematically dense, visceral and difficult to process sermon. It is a journey into the heart of darkness within the bruised conscience of American society rather than a Hollywood war film. Consequently, even though it indulges in operatic imagery of the battlefield with its sweeping tracking shots and an all-encompassing wide-angle perspective, Da 5 Bloods does not aspire to join the genre canon. After all, this is a Spike Lee joint, and everything the audience experiences is there to remind them of the illegality, immorality and inherent nefariousness of the American post-WWII foreign policy.
However, in contrast to Oliver Stone, whose Platoon and Born on The Fourth Of July have already blazed this trail, Spike Lee isn’t interested in simply re-treading the same waters. Instead, he uses the familiarity afforded by other works of cinema to stage a hyper-stylised morality play commenting directly on present-day America. To this end, he employs an amazing ensemble cast including Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors and his own habitué, Delroy Lindo, whose magnificent performance is likely to feature in the Oscar conversation later in the year. Interestingly, these characters and their quest to retrieve the remains of their fallen comrade (Chadwick Boseman) along with a treasure they left buried in Vietnam, are themselves highly symbolic. They are just as stylised as their surroundings and are meant to represent different shades of American society. This in turn gives Spike Lee the power to speak through them and preach directly to the viewer, which is frequently accomplished using Lee’s signature technique, likely borrowed from Yasujiro Ozu, of having the actors address the camera instead of each other.
netflixAdmittedly, the combination of Spike Lee’s political fervour and theatrical formality are anchored around noticeable references to Apocalypse Now!, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Three Kings and the aforementioned Platoon. These might be received by some viewers as a messy kitchen sink of ideas, but this is simply how this filmmaker operates. Much like his other great movies, Da 5 Bloods is an incredibly dense mixture of thematic melodies and rhythms that an unprepared ear might register as incomprehensible cacophony. However, when attuned, the viewer will recognise the film as a goldmine of political activism, It is a potent primal scream illuminating the continuing injustices perpetrated against black Americans and a whole lot more, all waiting to be mined during repeat viewings, which this movie simply demands.
Out of all Spike Lee’s films, Da 5 Bloods is likely one of his most ambitious and mature efforts aimed at resonating with a willing viewer both on an intellectual and visceral level. This is because, although he has evolved considerably as a filmmaker, Spike Lee’s voice has remained just as fierce and intimidating as it was when he made Do the Right Thing. One can only hope this time around his achievement will be appropriately recognised because Da 5 Bloods is extremely likely to feature on many year-end’s Best Of lists, and rightfully so.
