JUNGLE FEVER
Trusting to luck means listening to voices.
Third plot: Before he leaves his wife and daughter, Flipper asks his white bosses to make him a partner in their firm. He resigns when they refuse and announces that he’ll start a company of his own.
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Most irritating of all, Lee has shamelessly echoed the symmetrical framing devices used in Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues to begin and end this movie–with matching crane shots to establish a neighborhood, and matching lines and behavior to establish the situation of the characters–which brings a false sense of unity and closure to a movie that actively resists both. It’s the equivalent of a veteran jazz musician summoning up an old riff to round off a daring chorus when he suddenly runs out of gas, and even though it performs the expedient function of winding things up, it can’t disguise the fact that a lot of plot strands are still hanging.
Yet at times the experience is a little bit like being caught in a flood. To compound the general sense of surfeit and confusion, Lee has overloaded his sound track with more music than ever before, much of it vocal. It’s a relief to see him finally working with a composer other than his father Bill Lee, whose scoring skills have always struck me as questionable; the original music here was written by Stevie Wonder and Terence Blanchard, and it’s the best score for a Spike Lee film to date. But given how strong the film is without the music, Lee’s insistence on using it in practically every scene–featuring a 71-piece orchestra and the 49 voices of the Boys Choir of Harlem, and 23 new and old songs, including 3 by Frank Sinatra, 3 by Mahalia Jackson, and 13 by Wonder–is sometimes a bewildering belt-and-suspenders procedure. It’s as if he didn’t trust his material enough to allow it to speak for itself, but had to constantly juice it up to symphonic proportions.
Even more to the point, both Godard and Lee create all sorts of occasions and excuses for multiplying their uses of on-screen and offscreen verbiage, usually in unorthodox and innovative ways. Godard often has characters reading aloud or quoting from texts, and Lee seems equally compulsive about playing song lyrics over or under dialogue. Both seek out diverse ways of presenting words visually. (A few examples in Jungle Fever: jokey and thematically relevant street signs in the opening credits and printed song lyrics in the closing credits, both of which slide across the screen at oblique angles; inserted shots of maps with place-names to identify Harlem and Bensonhurst; a real New York Post headline, “Doin’ the Right Thing,” inserted as another intertextual reference in a scene in the candy store.)
