MALCOLM X
With Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, and Spike Lee.
“Malcolm constitutes the quintessential unfinished text,” notes Marlon Riggs in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image–an excellent recent collection edited by Joe Wood, that is already cited above. “He is a text that we, as Black people, can finish, that we can write the ending for, that we can give closure to–or reopen–depending on our own psychic and social needs.” Considering the diverse passions and biases reflected in the 15 black contributors to this book, it is easy enough to see what Riggs means, and not at all easy for a white writer like myself to feel like a legitimate voice in this debate.
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Lee dramatizes the fusion of–and confusion between–business and art better than any other American filmmaker who comes to mind. I certainly don’t begrudge him his marketing talent, including selling “Malcolm” products to white kids on Melrose Avenue in LA: he’s not doing anything the big corporations wouldn’t. When he inherits the talented Denzel Washington as his star from a package previously assembled for director Norman Jewison–an actor who seems too handsome, too dark-skinned, and too elegant for the part–I can sympathize and wish him well. (Larry Fishburne, for one, would almost certainly have been better casting.) Or when Lee calls Warner Brothers a plantation while clamoring for a higher budget and doing everything he can to emulate and imitate JFK, I can both see what he means and appreciate his ability to milk the press, the studio, and the audience at the same time. (He may be no David Lean, but there are times when his show-biz religiosity and his total lack of self-consciousness remind me of Cecil B. De Mille.) I can even understand, if not exactly appreciate, the reasons he occasionally conflates himself with Malcolm X as a controversial outspoken figure, apparently regarding his own life at times as a similar process of getting from one damned press conference to the next.
A postmodernist Brooklyn provincial, Lee tends to lose his bearings whenever he strays very far from the present and his home turf–one reason why Do the Right Thing, which sticks to a single block of Bed-Stuy over one recent summer day, remains his best movie. When he settles on what he knows, both a world and characters come into view, even if they’re perceived through a miasma of wallpaper music and endless show-off camera moves. When he doesn’t know as much about what he’s filming, the empty technique and the salad dressing take over, ejecting us from his material and straight into the Spike mystique, which is strictly business, not art. This is undoubtedly why the first hour or so of Malcolm X–set mainly during the early 40s in Boston and Harlem, with brief flashbacks to Michigan–probably contains the least reality of any Lee feature to date, although there are plenty of fancy zoot suits and glitzy crane shots to distract us from the overall lack of conviction.
That script, entitled One Day, When I Was Lost, was published 20 years ago and recently reprinted. Lee never mentions it or any of Baldwin’s dissatisfactions with what was done to it in By Any Means Necessary, which includes the fourth draft of the script he used, credited to Baldwin, Perl, and himself, in that order. The final movie, which differs from this fourth draft in many respects, credits only Perl and Lee because Baldwin’s sister Gloria, the executor of his estate, asked that her brother’s name be removed. It’s easy to sympathize with her decision; as the scene in Small’s Paradise now unfolds, Perl’s High Noon showdown is made to look like social realism. A big bully collides with Malcolm at the bar, derides him for not saying “Excuse me,” calls him an “old country nigger,” knocks off his hat, and adds, “What’s you gonna do? Run home to your mama?” Malcolm grabs a whiskey bottle, smashes it to smithereens against the guy’s jaw, and says, “Don’t you ever in your life say anything against my mama.” Then he retrieves his hat from a pretty and adoring woman at the bar, tenderly caresses her cheek, and orders a whiskey. Archie (Delroy Lindo) at his table in the next room is so awed by all this that he quickly contrives to buy Malcolm’s drink. It’s a quintessential Oscar-movie moment–complete with macho childishness, violent excess, and a comfortable indifference to history, setting, and character. If Baldwin’s name were still on the picture, he’d undoubtedly be spinning in his grave.
