Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020) (Patreon)

Obviously I'm a bit late to this one, since I made the choice to hold off watching it until 12/31/20. So there's not too much I can say about Da 5 Bloods that hasn't already been said elsewhere. I will say, it is great to see Lee working on this scale and receiving praise for it. Too often Lee has been smacked down by critics when he's worn his ambitions on his sleeve (Malcolm X being the notable exception). In many respects this is a classic Vietnam film, and at times that's the problem. There's a tension between Lee's political and cinephilic sides here, which is a shame since they could have thrown each other into relief. When Prince declared "I got two sides, and they both friends," he could have been talking about Spike Lee as well. But at the moment, those two sides appear to be on the outs.

Theoretically, Da 5 Bloods is a perfect rejoinder to the history of Vietnam representation. Vietnam, of course, was America's first "TV war," and this country's media being what it is (an outgrowth of systemic racism, most of the time), those dominant representations have mostly ignored the specific role played by Black soldiers in the conflict. In one of its semi-direct didactic asides, Da 5 Bloods explains that Black platoons were usually sent into the deadliest firefights -- "cannon fodder for Uncle Sam." The fact that this is the first mainstream American film focusing on the impact of Vietnam on Black people is absurd but not astonishing.

The gravity of this project isn't lost on Lee, and while Da 5 Bloods is a very good film, it sometimes buckles under the weight of its demands. The film is a Brechtian direct-address teaching object, an homage to directors like Francis Ford Coppola and (especially) Sam Fuller, and a contemporary examination of the lingering effects of Vietnam (and war more generally) on the minds and souls of Black folks. It would take a balancing act of major proportions to accomplish all of these tasks successfully and, more importantly, to weave them together in some way that turns the dissonances into a formal principle. Instead, for the most part, Da 5 Bloods seems frayed, like a film that is attempting a coherent texture but can't quite achieve it.

More specifically, there's a tension between realism and postmodern referentiality that tends to undermine both aspects of the project. Certain aspects of Da 5 Bloods are aggressively telegraphed, like its use of landmines, or the ultimate role of the guys' French business connection (Jean Reno). This is bad writing, unless (as I suspect) it's mean to signal a conscious homage to films like The Steel Helmet and The Big Red One. On the other hand, it's in the ensemble performances, the men actually struggling with Vietnam as both landscape and traumatic memory, that this film really shines. 

That's partly because these are the moments when Lee's departure from strict realism serves to complicate the main plot, rather than destabilize it. The dis-ease with which Paul (Delroy Lindo) accepts the renewed brothership of his war buddies, his fundamental inability to trust, is emphasized not only with stark framing and camerawork, but his delusional visits from his dead mentor Stormin' Norman (Chadwick Boseman). Lindo's performance, which displays raw emotional torment and a life spent under the yoke of racism, walks a thin line between Method exactitude and Expressionist abstraction. 

This formal crisis embodies Paul's dissolution as a human being. Lee might've made this, and only this, the crux of Da 5 Bloods. But the director is unwilling to strip things down or discard any of his (admittedly good) ideas. As a result, Da 5 Bloods takes its place with so many other flawed near-masterjoints -- School Daze, Bamboozled, Clockers, Chi-Raq, and so on.