Black KKKlansman

This year's BLACK KKKLANSMAN has been heralded as a "return to form" for director Spike Lee. I've lost track of him over the past few several years.  INSIDE MAN was a good but crazily overrated film, while MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, CHI-RAQ, and his remake of OLDBOY just didn't pique my interest.  But remember this is the artist who in 1989 brought the world the trenchant, brilliant, and relevant as ever DO THE RIGHT THING, one of the best portrayals of race relations I've seen.  Many of Spike's films examine the tensions between African Americans and their lighter skinned neighbors, and most don't flinch on the ugliness many of us try to ignore in real life.

Spike is also guilty of occasional excess, as when the American flag burned down to the shape of an "X" in MALCOLM X.  BLACK KKKLANSMAN, which during its final moments features an upside down American flag, is unfortunately rife with what I consider bad decisions as to how tell this "crazy, outrageous, incredible true story".  In a sentence, a black detective named Ron Stallworth infiltrates the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. How? By making his voice sound Caucasian over the phone and having his white partner pretend to be him in person for meetings.  You imagine all that could go wrong with this plan, but damned if it didn't lead to Klan members being demoted from their positions in the military.  Lee and the other screenwriters decided to change/add other elements to the plot to make it "more interesting":

1. Stallworth's partner was made Jewish.

2. The time period was changed from the late to the early 1970s.

3. C4 plays a big role in the Klan's efforts to disrupt the black student union.

I don't typically care about historic accuracy in films based on true events.  It's a movie, not a documentary.  "Real life" is just as much a part of the artist's tools as any other element.  But here, the changes feel very contrived and gratuitous, not really adding dramatic tension but implausibility.  "Flip" Zimmerman (Adam Driver) was an interesting character, but never believable in his behavior within the den of racists.  It's classic overracting, continuously and unconvincingly spouting epithets and slurs.  I never bought it (be aware that I'm criticizing the writing here, not Driver).  Felix (Jasper Paakkonen), a trigger happy Klan member, is suspicious; the rest seem too accommodating.  Did Spike really find it that clever and ironic to make Stallworth's partner a Jew? Have we not seen a device like this a few thousand times already?  I think the intact original story would've made a quieter, more incisive treatise, instead of a rowdy, yet tired polemic.

And did we need a scene with the Klan watching and cheering THE BIRTH OF A NATION? Were your points not hammered home hard enough already, Spike? That's another big problem - the film is too sledgehammer.  Didactic.  Filled with caricatures.  Note also the awkward and downright clumsy attempts to parallel this story with life in 2018.  The film seems to be trying to play it funny and satiric.  Cite the opening scene with Alec Baldwin as an hysterical bigot doing a rant on television or, something.  The entire scenario is wild and such an approach may have worked, but BLACK KKKLANSMAN mostly feels like a overlong comedy skit.  Too bad.  Props to John David Washington as Stallworth, though.  Respectful cameo for Harry Belafonte as well.

P.S.: The much talked about final moments worked for me, even though I ordinarily find such insertions of footage of real life events a bit of a disservice to the audience's intelligence (note the close of NATURAL BORN KILLERS).