Malcolm X

Spike Lee – 1992 – USA

After horning in on this movie while it was already in pre-production, self-righteous windbag Spike Lee found himself tasked with having to out-Gandhi Richard Attenborough and out-Color Purple Steven Spielberg by turning in a grandiose biopic that would not only gobble up Oscars and solemnly respectful reviews but become a staple of high school classrooms for years to come.  In this regard he somewhat succeeded, but in setting such a blandly respectable goal for himself, in lieu of an artistic one, he also made sure that Malcolm X would be the last time he was truly relevant; in the sense that his films are no longer anticipated events as they were briefly in the late 80s and early 90s.  He also rendered the film so sanitized and eager-to-please that it’s hardly dependable historically and hardly recognizable as his own work.  It seems to me that Scorsese, Spielberg, Attenborough, or even Norman Jewison, (the originally-attached director), might have turned out virtually the same product.  The only things that mark it as a Spike Lee “joint” are a handful of camera tricks ripped off from (I mean “inspired by”) Scorsese, and the inevitable presence of Lee himself in the cast.  Lee was so terrified of offending Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, (even though Farrakhan himself actively fueled animosity towards Malcolm X just prior to the latter’s 1965 assassination), that he whitewashed the film’s depiction of the church as much as he could without venturing into all-out fantasy, and – in a wonderful stroke of poetic justice – still earned a hilariously venomous condemnation from Farrakhan anyway.  Lee strains to be so epic and so momentous at every turn that he is barely able to breathe.  Even the casting of Denzel Washington is premeditated to create the impression of a glow or even a halo around the title character, not unlike when Max von Sydow played Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told.  What makes the film work, in spite of itself, is the strength of the reality of Malcolm X’s tumultuous life in the early 60s, mostly derived from Alex Haley’s book The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Malcolm’s conversion from criminal to Elijah Muhammad acolyte is handled very well, and I would have liked the film much more if it had been about an hour shorter and focused more on those details.  But in trying to be as sweeping as David Lean, while also portraying every human being as either completely evil or ridiculously saintly, Lee just overloads and bloats the film.  He was so preoccupied with turning Malcolm X into a role model for kids, (to the extent of insisting that they ditch school in order to pay to attend his movie on opening day), that he compromised his own credibility in a way that is deadly for an artist.  (Even back then, in 1992, many of us bristled at Lee’s badly veiled commercialism; ‘If it’s really that critical that every American see the film,’ we proposed, ‘let him show it for free.’)  Lee is the type of filmmaker who is convinced of his own significance as a cultural spearhead and is perfectly happy to suggest that he should never get a bad review from anyone because what he is doing is so important for humanity and the world.  He has infamously labeled people ‘racists,’ for no other reason than for not enjoying his inelegant and preachy films.  I never thought he was untalented, but, twenty-five years later, he has clearly paid a price for having chosen activism over art; he spends his days as a hired journeyman on Hollywood remakes, commenting on current events to an increasingly less interested press, to a generation who barely know who he is, and occasionally making topical independent films that nobody cares about.  The average man on the street would not be able to cite a Spike Lee film made after Malcolm X.  The real problem, in a nutshell, is that I want to like this film, and I do like a great deal of it, but you are never allowed to settle into it for one second because you are constantly having your face shoved into the fact that this isn’t really about Malcolm X at all but is all the doing of the great and noble Spike Lee.