It’s kind of funny how the press tries to portray Spike Lee as a provocateur more than he is. The way the media has portrayed it, Spike Lee,is at a near-constant war with film makers: He has amassed various beefs over the years: With Steven Soderbergh (for beating him at Cannes with Sex Lies and Videotape back in 1989), Clint Eastwood (for not putting enough black people in his Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers companion movies), Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book, and the Oscars So White Movement, and probably more. In reality, Spike Lee saves most of his trash talking for the Knicks court. If you look at the actual quotes, he’s a very classy individual who seems to have a great camaraderie and respect with most of his fellow film makers.
The degree that Spike Lee really responds to White art is
really through his work. Da 5 Bloods has
a film with a lot to say about the Black experience in war, and even then it’s
not a film that feels exclusively for a Black audience.
It’s a war film about four Vietnam veterans (played by
character actors Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clark Peters, and Isiah Whitlock
Jr.) who return to the war zone years later to recover some lost goal. Joining
them is one of the soldiers’ sons (Jonothan Majors) who acts as an audience
surrogate. There’s an aura of celebration like friends at a reunion, but come
on, this is a war movie: The façade is
quickly broken by revelations of post-war economic hardship and PTSD.
Like Platoon, Bridge on the River Kwai, or Apocalypse Now,
this film turns tragic as the crew is immersed into psychologically and
physically hellish situations. The main actor, Paul (Delroy Lindo in what might
be an Oscar-bait part), loses his mind, and survival is far from guaranteed for
any of them.
Perhaps, this is even more tragic than those other
films in that these veterans have been
through this before; it was clearly a difficult experience (as evidenced by the
haunting of the 5th blood); and they decided to undergo a mission
through the Vietnamese jungle again. Were they misinformed about how much those
jungles would be guarded by Vietnamese and mercenaries? Were they deluding
themselves into thinking this would be easy? Maybe the tragic reality (and
subtle economic commentary) is that they needed the gold that badly.
Either way, getting invested in these people’s lives means
you will be hit by the senseless of how it ends, but that’s par for the course
of a war movie. In other words, it’s an affecting film and a rich one.
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