Review of Summer of Sam (1999) by Alex M — 21 Mar 2004

[size=3]Spike Lee is a director who is clearly fascinated by heat...both the actual temperature and the psychological heat of a neighbourhood that constantly threatens to boil over. In [i]Do the Right Thing[/i], he showed us a neighbourhood teeming with animosity between races, and in [i]Summer of Sam[/i], his subject is an Italian-American neighbourhood overcome by paranoia, fear and suspicion. In 1977, New York City was terrorized by a .44-caliber murderer who referred to himself as the "Son of Sam". He murdered several young women, and young couples, brutally and without mercy. Lee's focus is not on the killer himself (although we do see some scenes that show his inner torment, and we also see the horrible aftermath of his crimes). Instead, the director uses the Son of Sam killings as a way of evoking exactly what it was like to live in a working-class New York neighbourhood during that particular summer. We are introduced to several characters, including the philandering Vinny (John Leguizamo), his faithful wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino), and their friends Richie (Adrien Brody) and Ruby (Jennifer Esposito). While Lee focuses on these characters just long enough to make them somewhat interesting, part of the problem with [i]Summer of Sam [/i]is that there is very little drama in the interaction of the characters. The most interesting character is probably Richie, who is gently ribbed when he shows up in the neighbourhood with a fake British accent and a punk hairstyle. That ribbing turns to hostility when the local toughs begin to grow certain that the murderer is in their neighbourhood, and turn their suspicion toward the outcast Richie. Lee focuses on other subplots, including the rocky marriage between Vinny and Dionna, and the way that the police use a local mobster (Ben Gazzara) to try to catch the killer. [i]Summer of Sam [/i]guides us through this world with energy and stylistic confidence, and there are not many moments when we are not interested in what will happen. Yet Lee somehow distances himself from the material too much: the film is so over-the-top in its style, we are not sure if Lee is making a hard-hitting social drama or a hip comedy. As an actual examination of the Son of Sam killings, the movie is a failure...yet I do not believe that Lee intends to make a film about those murders. His goal is an allegory about paranoia, but even on that level the film is not as emotionally powerful as it could have been. [i]Summer of Sam [/i]is never dull, it is uniformly well-acted and only rarely does Lee lose his grasp on the material. And yet, the film is never quite able to powerfully convey just what it was like to be a New Yorker during that hot summer when the Yankees were tearing up baseball, and David Berkowitz was terrorizing the streets.[/size].

[size=3](BASIC)[/size].