We saw Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s most recent “joint” a couple of weeks ago. I’ve delayed trying to write about it as I’m still not sure I can get it right! We’ll see…
I think Chi-Raq is Spike’s strongest movie to date – and yet in some ways a failure. I’d venture to call it a failed masterpiece that has to be seen.
As it came and went quickly (we saw it in Netflix within 6 weeks of when it had opened), here’s some background in case you missed it. Chi-Raq is both the title and the name of a lead character. It derives from Chicago and Iraq and is intended to have us contemplate the incredible stupid loss of life in both places – more people have been murdered in Chicago over recent years than Americans were killed in the entire Iraq fiasco. The movie deals with the situation that has produced this – the miserable schools, lack of employment opportunities, white flight and ghettoization, drugs and their role in economic opportunity, unstable families, gangs as the path to self-esteem and reputation, overall cheapness of life, and the incredible collateral damage of all that on black lives. (Among the many criticisms of the film were that it “unfairly” targets Chicago, implies a universal from a local situation, limits itself to black-on-black crime, etc. In actuality, it’s an incredible plea that all black lives matter.)
With incredible ambition, Spike addresses these issues, educating on their causes, and making it clear that change has to start from the perpetrators and victims themselves – another source of some criticism. (Also unfair in that it’s quite clear that he’s nor framing an either/or but a both/and in which without change from within, no level of programs from without will do the trick.)
Now all that may sound like a downer, but Spike has delivered a rollicking, sexy, musical, theatrical, fast moving, satirical, linguistically indelicate, arousing film that makes all these points. He has based the film on Lysistrata, Aristophanes‘ 3000-year-old comedy of the women of Greece uniting to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their men until they stop the war. In Spike’s terms, “no peace, no pussy.” The film adheres closer to the Lysistrata model than one might at first think, including scenes of alliances across traditional enemies, of sexual teasing, of old men basically seeking exemption, of the strike spreading well beyond the Chicago neighborhood in which it starts. And, much of the film is in rhyming couplets or iambic pentameter, or rap.
Incredibly ambitious, brilliantly adapting Lysistrata to deliver an extraordinarily powerful message, attempting to show current Chicago issues within the entire history of black oppression in the US, I think it falls just short of a masterpiece – some plot elements don’t quite work, some questions are left hanging, and of course there are certain hard combinations of deep insight and incredible naiveté, and of individuation and stereotype. There’s also some remarkable acting, not only by stalwarts like Samuel Jackson, Angela Bassett, John Cusack and Wesley Snipes, but also by newcomers (at least to me) like Nick Cannon and Teyonah Parris as the leads Chi-Raq and Lysistrata.
Whatever your politics and whatever your stance towards Spike Lee, this is an important movie to see – and probably to see again.