The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Spike Lee

WRITER

Spike Lee

STARS

Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, John Turturro

BEFORE

1965 In The Hill, directed by Sidney Lumet, racial tensions rise among soldiers in the intense heat of Libya’s desert.

1986 She’s Gotta Have It is Lee’s comedy about a Brooklyn girl juggling three suitors.

AFTER

1992 Lee makes Malcolm X, a critically acclaimed biopic of the radical civil rights activist.

2006 Inside Man is Lee’s hugely successful movie about a Wall Street bank heist, starring Denzel Washington.

Few movies capture the drama of city life as successfully as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The story is driven by outrage at racial discrimination, but the movie conveys its message with sizzling energy and a refusal to offer any easy solutions. From the first scene, in which a radio DJ announces the heat wave that engulfs his listeners, the physical discomfort of the characters is a metaphor for social unease. The story is set in New York, in the diverse Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where racial tension is never far beneath the surface. As the temperature rises, the veneer of civility begins to crack, and a montage of characters is shown delivering a stream of racial abuse direct to camera, each face wild with hatred.

Mookie, played by Lee himself, works as a pizza delivery man for Sal (Danny Aiello). Previously seen as a tolerant man, Sal unleashes his own verbal tirade when black youths stage a protest after an argument over why his restaurant only displays pictures of Italian-Americans, when most of his customers are black. As tempers fray, the protest escalates into violence. By the time the police arrive, the whole neighborhood is threatening to boil over into chaos.

Do the Right Thing is a movie brimming with life but shot through with ambivalence. Even in a racially diverse community, it is saying, there is a worrying limit to anyone’s tolerance.

"Do the Right Thing doesn’t ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair."

Roger Ebert

What else to watch: The Cardinal (1963) ✵ Jungle Fever (1991) ✵ Malcolm X (1992) ✵ 25th Hour (2002) ✵ Inside Man (2006) ✵ Selma (2014)