Red Hook Summer (2012, Spike Lee) (Patreon)

47/100

Skipped this in first-run due to negative reviews, which I now see mostly complain that Lee's charming neighborhood portrait gets scuttled by a sudden infusion of jarring melodrama. It wouldn't quite be accurate to say that I had the opposite reaction—Lee's gearshift doesn't "work" in any conventional sense, certainly didn't inspire the thought "Okay, this is gettin' good"—but Red Hook Summer boasts two magnificent, Spike's Pantheon-worthy sequences, in my opinion, both of which follow rather than precede Blessing's unexpected appearance at the Lil' Peace of Heaven Baptist Church. Prior to that, I'd been feeling very frustrated with the film, primarily because Lee foregrounds two extremely awkward adolescent non-pros, supplementing their stilted line readings with more Thomas Jefferson Byrd than any one Joint really needs. (With all due respect to Byrd's impressive theatrical résumé, there's a reason why he's rarely been cast onscreen by any other director.) This was apparently a guerrilla production in many respects, shot quickly by Lee in conjunction with his film students, and there's a distinctly amateur-ish vibe throughout that made me even more grateful for Clarke Peters' presence than I'd usually be. Wound up enjoying Da Good Bishop's sermons more than almost anything else in the movie, despite being a diehard atheist who finds impassioned religious rhetoric inherently silly; Peters beautifully conveys Enoch's penchant for keeping one eye on the congregation as a whole and the other eye squarely on Flik, striving to target the latter without alienating the former, and his sturdy professionalism is gratifying for its own sake. Plus Flik can't use his iPad 2* in church, so I'm not regularly distracted in those scenes by the striking contrast in color grading between what Flik shoots and "the real world" (which is roughly 20x hotter via Lee's camera than is the actual real world). Oh, and Bruce Hornsby's intrusive piano gets replaced by choral singing.

For an hour and a half, then, Red Hook Summer lived down to its reputation as one of Lee's weaker efforts. I was particularly unconvinced by the recurring subplot involving Nate Parker's aggressive aspiring rapper Box, who eventually functions as the Barry Pepper to Enoch's Edward Norton (minus the goading, obviously; same fundamental[ist] sins-must-be-cleansed-by-violence dynamic, though). However, the lengthy sequence of Enoch staggering home through Red Hook after getting the shit kicked out of him, accompanied by gospel music, ranks among Lee's most powerful achievements. That's true even though the film as a whole hasn't emotionally contextualized this walk of shame very well—for a director of Lee's caliber, it turns out, that matters scarcely at all. Just soul-searing. Similarly, I was kinda floored by the celebratory closing montage, which feels bizarrely disconnected from what happened during the previous 20 minutes (unlike, say, 25th Hour's parade of faces bidding Monty farewell) but is so gorgeously conceived and executed that really who cares? Coincidentally, my friend/peer Michael Sicinski polled his own patrons recently about auteurist completism, asking whether cinephiles should feel obligated to watch every film, no matter how reputedly bad, by an undisputedly great director. Just 11% voted Yes, but I was among them, and here's a perfect example of why. Admittedly Red Hook Summer at its worst is light years more tolerable than Altman's Beyond Therapy, the film that inspired Michael's poll. Still, I plan to catch up with She Hate Me at some point, and will be surprised if it offers nothing whatsoever that makes me glad that I did. The masters have their off days, like everyone else, but those failures also generally have their occasional flashes of genius. 

* I'm torn on whether it's funny or annoying that Flik constantly emphasizes that it's an iPad 2 (which I assume was then the newest model). Also, I can't elegantly fit this observation into the main text, but the way Lee shoots the FaceTime conversation between Flik and his mom, employing shot/reverse-shot with both actors facing the same direction (rather than talking directly to camera, which is the approach everyone else uses), is a striking if slightly disorienting innovation that I'm surprised nobody's swiped in the past eight years.