MO’ BETTER BLUES
First the good news: strictly as an exercise de style, Spike Lee’s fourth joint is in certain respects the liveliest and jazziest piece of filmmaking he’s turned out yet. From the arty close-ups behind the opening credits of–and liquid pans past, and dissolves between–trumpet, lips, and lovers’ grasping hands in blue, yellow, amber, and green to the matching semicircular crane shots that frame the story, this is a movie cooking with ideas about filmmaking. Bringing back a good many of the featured players in Do the Right Thing, and introducing to the Spike Lee stable the highly talented Denzel Washington, Cynda Williams, Wesley Snipes, and Dick Anthony Williams (among others), it’s a movie bursting with personality and actorly energy as well.
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Without delving too deeply, questions about Lee’s family dynamics seem unavoidable considering the peculiar stresses in his work. The scores for all of his features, written by his father, jazz bassist and composer Bill Lee, are invariably cluttered orchestral works that function less as film scores than as rather pretentious autonomous compositions. (One can find a related if usually less severe problem in Francis Coppola’s occasional use of music by his father, Carmine.) The fact that Lee comes, as he puts it, from a “jazz household” was part of his stated motivation for making the film, and while it may give Mo’ Better Blues a bit more backstage authenticity than either Round Midnight or Bird, Lee’s movie has a considerably less developed feeling for the music.
The anxious moves that ensue point to Lee’s succumbing to the music-video syndrome: they generally have nothing to do with building a structure and everything to do with reaching for immediate effects that often make larger structures impossible, which actively works against many of Lee’s larger dramatic aims. The results are an overloaded sound track and overloaded direction that often barely seem to be on speaking terms, although they’re both churning away at full blast. And as mistrustful as I generally am of vulgar Freudianism, it’s hard to overlook the oedipal conflicts that crop up in the plots of School Daze and Do the Right Thing, made especially complex in the latter case because the father figure, Danny Aiello, is white. In Mo’ Better Blues, father and son are complicitous buddies, but the implied inevitability of the son replicating the attitudes of the father produces a number of ambiguities and ironies, not all of them hopeful.
When Bleek disappears for a year, we have no idea where he goes or what he does, or even whether his family knows of his whereabouts, and significantly we don’t much care. We accept the vagueness–if we accept it–like so much else in the film, as a mere trope filling out a design, similar to the long stretches of background music that we aren’t supposed to hear so much as overhear (a curious attitude to take toward the music that the movie’s romantic hero is supposed to be obsessed with). And when we hear Clarke sing for the first time, toward the end of the film soon after Bleek’s return from the netherworld, it isn’t clear whether he’s hearing her sing for the first time as well–which would be important if the characters had any depth. Similarly, Bleek’s friendship with Giant and his relationships with both Indigo and Clarke are never distinctive enough to convey any sense of urgency or uniqueness. Regrettably, the only motifs in the story that seem to energize Lee’s writing are Bleek’s relationship to his father and the familiar theme of competition–whether it’s between Bleek and Shadow or between Indigo and Clarke–and even here, the plot points occasionally seem forced. (Though both Giant and Bleek complain about Shadow’s solos being too long, for instance, we never hear anything to substantiate this charge.)
Furthermore, one can only applaud the overall spirit of experimentation, especially in the editing, that leads to highly unconventional sequences reflecting the characters’ particular states of mind: Bleek’s literal confusion between Indigo and Clarke is effectively illustrated by a series of graceful matching cuts (evocative of Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire) that have him making love to and arguing with both of them at the same time; later, Lee charts the mutual uncertainties of Bleek and Indigo, when they meet after a year apart, with highly disconcerting mismatches in the editing. For all the confusion and inadequacy on view here, Lee can’t be accused of either backing away from the promise of Do the Right Thing or following the abject practice of attempting a sequel or remake. For better and for worse, you might just say that like his dimly imagined hero, he’s simply trying a few things out.
