Chi-Raq movie review & film summary (2015)
Every Lee film has an affinity for the theatrical. Characters sometimes stand at center stage (center screen in a film) and talk right to the audience, often in a tight closeup, or chatter among themselves to create a communal buzz that can feel like what 1960s activists might have called a "rap session" ("rapping" as in talking; see the guys on the street corner in "Do the Right Thing," or the women debating the politics of skin color in "Jungle Fever"). Sometimes—as in the birthday present to Nola in "She's Gotta Have It," much of "School Daze," the opening credits of "Do the Right Thing," the Harlem sequences of "Malcolm X," and the dance floor number in "Summer of Sam"—Lee's characters burst into dance, or song, or both. Lee has often said that he wanted to make another full-on musical after "School Daze" but never got around to it, although he kept circling versions of "Rent" and "West Side Story" without landing on them. There is a sense in which Lee has always been a theatrical director, as well as a rhetorician or commentator and a stand-up comic, even as he proved himself a master of images who directs in a way that's equally intuitive and intellectual (not unlike a jazz musician who sticks to the sheet music sometimes, but improvises other times). All these complementary and conflicting aspects of Lee come together in "Chi-Raq," a movie that's held together by force of conviction.
Is the movie self-conscious, busy, perhaps all over the place? Absolutely. But this is what a Spike Lee film is, and does. And here, at least, it all seems to be of-a-piece, because the whole thing has been conceived by Lee and Willmott as a spectacularly cinematic equivalent of a stage play: a bit of literal street theater (with reference to gang and drug war and police brutality incidents dating back to the eighties) that aims to provoke and astonish, surprise and shock.
The movie does all of these things and more. There are scenes that are gut-bustingly funny, other scenes that are intensely sexy (especially the final musical number, a "duet" of sorts between Cannon and Parris). And from time to time the movie seems to calm down and clear its head so that it can concentrate on a single character at a single moment, often one of great distress. I will never forget the sight of Hudson's grieving mother on her knees in the street, trying to scrub her daughter's blood from the pavement with a sponge.
The movie offers no answers to the problems it presents—rampant street crime in poor neighborhoods; a gun-worshiping American culture tied to capitalist rapaciousness that's hooked into the country's culture of Permanent War; the lure of machismo, which makes violent confrontation seem "sexier" than negotiation and de-escalation. But it is not a film's job to offer answers. The job of a movie like this one is to stimulate arguments and hook itself into the viewer's imagination, and "Chi-Raq" accomplishes that job brilliantly. Its timing could not be worse, or more perfect. It is the movie we need right now, whether we're willing to admit it or not.
