Review of Do the Right Thing (1997) by Manny C — 20 Nov 2012

After a black man tosses a garbage can through the window of his employers' pizzeria at the climax of the hot-blooded, feverish Do The Right Thing, everyone else starts going wild with rage. There were fears back in 1989 (when the film was released) that such chaos would erupt off screen as well. Producer-writer-director-actor Spike Lee felt his film would garner him accusations of trying to stir up revolution. Universal put up $6.5 million to make the film, while Paramount passed on it, fearing 'black people will come out of the theaters wanting to burn shit down' in Lee's words.

But Do The Right thing, more than twenty years later, isn't dangerous, but the festering, seething racial hatred on all sides depicted in the film is. It's may not provoke riots but it can and still does provoke debate. Lee's two previous efforts, the amazing She's Gotta Have It and the not so amazing School Daze, made some serious stabs at social commentary, but neither of those films can prepare you for the raw heat and emotion of Do The Right Thing.

Lee's film is brimming with hot-blooded urgency, the calling card of an artist eager to have his say. Sometimes that eagerness can result in some preaching, but there's still no mistaking its power to provoke. Do The Right Thing to this day is Lee's boldest, most extraordinary work.

It permeates the screen with humor, sex and a scorching soundtrack, and the all too dominant emotion of anger. Set during a single twenty-four hour period in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year, cameraman Ernest Dickerson ensures the heat and tension is felt.

Lee is Mookie, who we first see being berated as lazy and unmotivated by his sister Jade, played by Lee's real life sister Joie Lee, and Jade has a point. Mookie dodges responsibility to his son by a Puerto Rican teen (Rosie Perez) and works a dead-end job making deliveries for Sal's Famous Pizzeria, run by an Italian family that commutes from Bensonhurst.

Sal (Danny Aiello) owns the pizzeria with his sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edsen), and though they are essentially archetypes of unabashed bigotry, they never allow for their characters to fall into stereotypical crassness. Sal is respectful to his mostly black customers so long as they play by his rules. He keeps a baseball bat handy should anyone get rough. And today is the day that happens.

The pizzeria and baseball bat serve as two subtle references to Howard Beach, a Queens neighborhood where three black men were attacked near a pizzeria in December of '86 by a mob of young white men wielding a baseball bat and tree limbs. One of the black men was killed by a passing car, another beaten nearly to death. Convictions were wrought for manslaughter, not murder; misdemeanors rather than felonies. The verdict symbolized racial injustice and black unrest for many. As Lee put it 'Black folks are tired of being killed.'.

Lee's film is undeniably political, and was release at a time black entertainers who could make real statements didn't, and those who wished to could only do so through comedy (think Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle). Still, they were preferable to some of the efforts from white filmmakers on the subject, like Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, which appear to think black people only attend church.

Lee's film may be filled with black characters who are unruly, poor, unemployed and under-educated, but dignity and wit they do not lack. And everyone has their own slant on the title. The older generation, wonderfully represented by the great Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, know all too well the crushing fight against racism. The street corner know-it-alls (Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison and the late, much-missed Robin Harris) just sit back and lay some brutal wit and honesty on those who fight that fight. Still some of the younger generation tries. Buggin' Out, played excellently by Giancarlo Esposito, has had it with the photos of celebrated Italians like Sinatra and Stallone that adorn the wall of Sal's. He and his friends want to see some black folks on that wall, but Sal isn't having it.

When Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn, superb) walks into Sal's with his boom box blaring Public Enemy's incendiary classic 'Fight The Power', all hell breaks loose. Sal destroys the radio that is sacrosanct to Raheem and a fight ensues. Police are called. White police and one of them chokes Raheem to death.

That senseless killing pushes Mookie past the breaking point, and he hurls a trash can through Sal's window. The sweltering heat only exacerbates the violence that escalates into a riot. Sal's pizzeria is torched, with the entire community of Bed-Stuy cheering. Firefighter unleash their hoses to disperse the crowd. It's a scene that hauntingly evokes memories of Montgomery and Birmingham.

The next morning Sal and Mookie talk among the ruins. Mookie regrets his actions but won't budge on principal. He also wants his wages owed to him. Sal is bitter but now sees Mookie for the human being he is and how he'll go to great lengths for his rights. The film ends on a mixed message with two quotations appearing onscreen, one from Dr. King dismissing violence as an 'impractical and immoral' method to achieve racial justice, the other from Malcolm X, saying 'I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence.'.

Lee has been criticized for seemingly failing to take a stand on either side, but he's not the only one. The black community as a whole has been struggling for decades to reconcile those two philosophies, and thankfully Lee and his film doesn't do the thinking for the audience which is really what critics want. There's no real solution offered, nor is there any uplift. Only a devastating portrait of black America on the verge, and the outcome, twenty plus years later, is yet to be seen. You can't ignore Do The Right Thing. It shakes you.