Spike Lee’s bold and highly ambitious 25th feature is one of the best films of this awards season. It is a culmination of the themes he has explored many times before, but rarely with such compassion, complexity, depth, and live-wire energy.
We start out with Muhammad Ali’s famous words as he refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War. His rant highlights the ravenousness of the American way that led to the colonization of others, the incorporation and arbitrary re-nationalization of Africans, the use of this forcibly assimilated yet segregated and scapegoated group to help murder and oppress yet another group – now in Southeast Asia, Vietnam – with the goal to exert their hegemony and exceptionalism. It all happened under the guise of fighting the ideology of communism and protecting democracy, without them having a single word on the matter. Black people have fought and died in the war against the South, in World War 1 and 2, in ‘Nam and in all American wars since. Da 5 bloods is a eulogy of this victimhood, with Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott rewriting a screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo to be about black soldiers.
Our heroes Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) were there. The film picks them up as fun-seeking and rowdy, yet deeply traumatized seniors who want to revisit their past by going back, to find the corpse of their platoon commander (the late Chadwick Boseman) and some gold that they buried. They are looking for closure, adventure and they want to get rich. As we explore their interpersonal relationships, their current standing in the world – as black veterans who just about managed to sneak back into a society that never wanted them in the first place – we see reflections on how individual personhood is positioned within the universal and the historical, creating complicated identities.
Paul went so far to “get what’s his” he became a Trump supporter, and without self-awareness, he identifies with the movement’s trademark fascism, its malignantly narcissistic and petty worldview based on fear, hate and delusions of grandeur (Lee jokingly refers to 45 as “President Bone Spurs”, alluding to his false excuse used to dodge the draft). Otis, the level-headed one of the group has fathered a child with Thien, a South Vietnamese woman (Y. Lan). A French woman, Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), heiress of a wealthy colonialist rubber plantation owning family of French Indochina, decided to become a landmine disposing social activist to deal with her “bourgeois guilt”. The socio-political context of one’s own identity is always within arm’s reach in a place like Vietnam.
Da 5 Bloods is especially relevant considering recent events, but it would do disservice to both the real occurrences and the film itself if the focus was on something so obvious. This is also a tale of black brotherhood, black masculinity superimposed on previous images of quintessentially white American masculinity and the merging of the two, showing the noble or not so noble failure of this masculinity. There is racism and a constant projection of ‘the other’ by all sides, whether by white or black Americans, white French, North or South Vietnamese people. The struggle of the oppressed to become equal and free of racism or classism has been relevant and ever-present since colonialism has reared its ugly head. Lee seems to be showing that the screaming has never stopped, just wasn’t heard, or it was ignored. Therefore, he does not have the luxury or privilege to always be subtle. He needs us to hear him, without the slightest chance of misunderstanding, now.
At first his approach felt somewhat didactic, scattershot, and tonally uneven with awkward transitions, yet by the one-hour mark (the 155 minutes practically sprint by without the film losing any of its gravity), underneath all bombast, Lee almost invisibly built up a delicate resonance that completely sneaked up on me. As violent emotions gathered like black clouds and the tension has become palpable, it was impossible to turn away. Lee is much helped by Terence Blanchard’s sweeping score (unjustly the film’s only Oscar nomination) full of both glory and failure that this time mythologizes black soldiers instead of white ones, yet this is not a nationalistic or mawkish “America reign supreme” piece, but one that earns its emotionality through honesty.
The film is a pointed lecture on civil rights, a Vietnam War film, a “guys on a mission” yarn, a paranoid tale of greed á laThe Treasure of The Sierra Madre, and a playful and touching ode to male friendship and sacrifice. We get dynamic shootouts, rakish banter, high drama, even some existential despair. In the war flashbacks Lee switches to a television standard 1.33:1 ratio from the 1.85:1 widescreen, to frame these memories inside an old picture (it might also reference how the war was broadcast into the populace’s living rooms) that is nostalgic for bonds forged in hardship, seen from the perspective of the shifting alliances, and weakening trusts of the present. It is a revelatory choice not to de-age the elderly leads (except for one photograph) using CGI or have them be played by young actors in the scenes of the past. They remember who they once were, augmented by the reflective knowledge of their present selves.
As the alienated Paul, Delroy Lindo gives a stunning performance, the kind that only comes around every few years. He is a crazy bogeyman, he is Colonel Kurtz, he is Captain Ahab, he is Fred C. Dobbs, he is a 21st century Troy Maxson picking a fight with the eternal and he is the haggard personification of the pain and injustice black people are suffering to this day. Through his overpowering presence, the film in part becomes an American tragedy. In one of his strongest scenes, he turns his back to the camera to doggedly walk away reciting a volatile and sorrowful rendition of the Lord’s Prayer. He is heading into the abyss that is himself. Lee, while his dialogue might not reach the poetry of the great playwrights like O’Neill or Wilson, gives Lindo scenes that allow the performance to reach almost Shakespearean heights and become theatrical as he stares deeply into the camera’s eyes and speaks to us. Paul is an ‘eternal’ man letting the hate in his heart darken his world to a point where there is nothing else left. Can he find redemption and forgiveness?
The rest of the cast are also excellent. The recently deceased Chadwick Boseman has built a career on playing iconic characters, both real and fictional. His casting as Stormin’ Norman has a loaded resonance. He is mainly required to be there as the superego of the film, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t strong or memorable here. Clarke Peters is moving in the role of Otis, with his grounded presence serving as an anchor for the whole film and to Lindo’s larger than life theatrics leaping off the screen.
Da 5 bloods is an important history lesson that educates and entertains in equal measure.
Rating: 87%
Ágoston's Film Odyssey 