Blu-ray Review: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing on the Criterion Collection

With this extraordinary transfer, Criterion honors the profound hothouse intensity of Spike Lee’s greatest film.

Do the Right ThingSpike Lee’s films have always deftly worked comedy into tragedy. In School Daze, he stages the psychologically self-destructive conflict between light- and dark-skinned black girls as a jazzy, old Hollywood musical showstopper. In Jungle Fever, Samuel L. Jackson’s Gator gives his unforgiving father one last dance he made up just for his mom, and hustles his way into an early grave. Crooklyn’s loopy Aunt Song discovers her lost dog’s corpse when it catapults out of the hide-a-bed like a canine Pop-Tart. And in Do the Right Thing, his uncontestable masterpiece, and one American cinema’s unimpeachable classics, Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment.

In fact, Lee swings for the fences from frame one, with Rosie Perez’s Tina thrusting, grinding, kicking, and boxing her frustrations out to Do the Right Thing’s uncompromising musical leitmotif, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Lee’s scenario restricts him to a rough baker’s dozen hours in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant on what newspapers are warning will likely be the hottest day of the year. Assisted by a trio of old men sitting idly in front of a blazing red wall (the film’s Greek chorus, if you will), Lee introduces a fully functional community at various stages of wit’s end, even before the sun has hit high noon. In an almost exclusively African-American and Puerto Rican and largely lower-middle-class section of Bed-Stuy, residents are both fed and economically mocked by the only two successful businesses in the area: a corner market run by Koreans and a pizzeria owned and operated by the Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello), a gruff but genial soul who rather presumptuously assumes himself to be the neighborhood paterfamilias. Aside from his two sons (one racist, the other naïve), Sal also employs and acts as surrogate father to Mookie (Lee), who serves as the neighborhood’s unofficial liaison between Sal and his clientele.

Even before Bed-Stuy’s race relations unravel in the heat, Do the Right Thing strives for insistent political consciousness, which is to say that Lee doesn’t just bring up political topics but dares to actually take positions. (In one scene, he films a benign conversation about the pitfalls of interracial, intergenerational courtship in front of a brick wall bearing the graffiti message “Tawana told the truth,” referring to the alleged rape of Tawana Brawley at the hands of, among other white men, New York cops.) Sometimes the politics are conservatively combative, as when a white cyclist, Clifton (John Savage), scuffs Buggin Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) pristine Air Jordans and justifies his right to gentrify Bed-Stuy with a curt “I was born in Brooklyn.” Other times the politics are more provocatively combative, as in the Brechtian interlude in which Mookie, Pino, and other representatives of the block spew as many hateful racial slurs as they can manage, some of which are wickedly funny (the white cop calls an off-screen Puerto Rican a “pointy-shoes red-wearing Menudo mira-mira cocksucker”).

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Some reviewers, largely the same nervous nellies who warned that the film might incite race riots, took issue with Lee’s perceived free pass to eschew political correctness, especially in Bush I’s “kinder, gentler nation.” But that’s precisely the point of Do the Right Thing. It takes political concepts away from the lip service of cloistered authority figures, including the film’s dirty cops, and dissects them through the lives of those who are forced to live by them. In this context, DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy’s (Jackson) stately, nearly two-and-a-half-minute roll call of great black musicians carries as much weight of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lee’s deceptively vibrant pop comedy is both freewheeling and, as Do the Right Thing’s final half hour reveals, extraordinarily calculated. When tempers spiral out of control and police arrive on the scene and grave injustice is meted out on Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), the disruption is a direct slap to shake audiences out of their complacency. But rather than react with solemnity, Lee shoots the resulting riot with the same angular, fish-eyed, oversaturated effects as he uses for earlier, funnier moments, again aligning tragedy with comedy and suggesting that the powers that be can strike at any given moment. And because the racially charged dialogue early in the film is presented in the same cinematic context as what’s a pretty clear-cut case of institutionalized race hate, Lee manages to suggest a clear political position while still admitting there are never any simple answers. Instead of ending the film on a note of mutual understanding between Sal and Mookie, as originally scripted, Lee instead closes on a note of fragile, quizzical acknowledgment. Nothing more.

What critics in 1989 called incendiary and angry should more accurately be characterized as challenging. Do the Right Thing is no staid civics lesson; rather, it’s a microcosmic test case in the form of a seamless ensemble piece. Anyone who thinks that Spike Lee joints are always disappointing would be forgiven for thinking so if they’re comparing the filmmaker’s works against this perfectly balanced one. If other films in his body of work have approached Do the Right Thing in confidence, few by Lee or anyone else have better feng shui. Like Rear Window to Alfred Hitchcock, like Nashville to Robert Altman, like Playtime to Jacques Tati, Lee’s Do the Right Thing is an undiluted representation of its creator’s artistic command.

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Image/Sound

This image boasts outstanding clarity and vitality, improving significantly on prior restorations of Do the Right Thing. Colors explode off the screen, especially the primary hues that lend the film a kind of hothouse poetry, and textures are viscerally sharp. One can clearly make out everything from the pores of the characters’ skin to the grit of the streets to the minute little details of Sal’s pizza pies. This upgrade serves to further reaffirm the intoxicating intimacy of Spike Lee’s communal morality play, which of course renders the violence all that more disturbing. (The police baton used to kill Radio Raheem positively gleams, reflecting a street light.) The 5.1 speaker audio track is similarly impeccable, and similarly intensifies the film’s violence. Every little sound resounds with vivid vibrancy, especially the sounds of the characters walking the streets, which contrast in accordance with their varying ages and bodies. (Da Mayor’s shambling tread goes a long way to establishing his worldview and personality.) The film’s astute use of music, from Bill Lee’s jazz score to Public Enemy’s iconic “Fight the Power,” is also accorded a full and balanced soundstage.

Extras

Somewhat disappointingly, this mammoth collection only includes a few new extras, such as an interview with costume designer Ruth E. Carter and a program in which New York City Council member Robert Cornegy Jr., writer and director Nelson George, and filmmaker Darnell Martin discuss New York City in the 1980s while examining Do the Right Thing’s social significance. However, the archive extras, mostly ported over from prior Criterion editions, still offer a fantastic glimpse into the making of the film, particularly footage of a table read, in which we see Lee giving the actors notes early into the process of bringing his screenplay to life. Meanwhile, the St. Clair Bourne-directed “Making of Do the Right Thing” documentary offers an observational look at how Lee’s production affected the neighborhood in which it was shot, and is complemented by a short program called “Back to Bed-Stuy.”

The best supplement, especially for aspiring filmmakers, is still the 1995 audio commentary by Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas, and actor Joie Lee. Lee talks about character motivation as well as Do the Right Thing’s political significance, while Dickerson and Thomas offer sharp detail about the shaping of the film’s aesthetic. (Most memorably, Dickerson discusses a “formula for creating sunlight,” in which he tried to convey the sun’s shifting presence as well as the profound heat of the setting.)

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In one of the many intros peppered throughout the set, Lee addresses the troubling reviews the film received at the time, in which critics seemed to be more offended by the destruction of Sal’s pizzeria than by Radio Raheem’s murder. Offering a further deep dive into Lee’s mindset and working methods is a booklet including an excerpt from a journal he kept in 1988, as he was moving from School Daze on to Do the Right Thing, as well as an essay by critic Vinson Cunningham. A whole host of other odds and ends offer texture as to how Do the Right Thing was created and subsequently received, including a Cannes press conference, a breakdown of the storyboarding of the riot scene, and a collection of extended and deleted scenes.

Overall

With this extraordinary transfer, Criterion honors the profound hothouse intensity of Spike Lee’s greatest film.

Score: 
 Cast: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, Robin Harris, Joie Lee, Miguel Sandoval, Rick Aiello, John Savage, Samuel J. Jackson, Rosie Perez, Roger Guenveur Smith, Steve White, Martin Lawrence  Director: Spike Lee  Screenwriter: Spike Lee  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 120 min  Rating: R  Year: 1989  Release Date: July 23, 2019  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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