SUMMER OF SAM is so pleasurable and entertaining, not least because it is Spike Lee's first watchable film in over a decade, that it seems beside the point to suggest that (I hope I stay within the IMDb guidelines in doing so - it's a positive, non-spiteful review, honest!), from a cinematic and creative point of view, almost everything is either wrong or derivative. In fact, I wasted the first half of the film ticking off its flaws until I copped onto myself, sat back and enjoyed.
I may as well get the negative stuff out of way and so end on a celebratory note. Although more fluid than Lee's previous films, SAM's movement, especially in the opening sequences, evoke genuine masterpieces like BOOGIE NIGHTS or GOODFELLAS, and can only seem lumbering beside them. Those films used gliding camera movements, elaborate set-ups and montage so effortlessly subliminal it felt like a pan, to signify the emotional mindset of a wannabe newcomer into a strange community.
This is SAM's problem. We are not guided through the exhiliration, terror and banality of late 70s New York by a central protagonist, but by an organising external force, the opening narrator (a curmudgeonly ex-cop), the director, whoever. John Sayles managed to pull off something similar with more success in CITY OF HOPE - another tale of a city at crisis point told through the interconnected narratives of a group of characters.
The form is actually very literary (I was reminded of Tom Wolfe's novels, for example), and its tenets are very conservative. It suggests that something as unmanageably sprawling as a city, with millions of individually complex units can be made to conform to a pattern to create meaning; that problems can be controlled.
SAM is a very reassuring film: the melodramatics are cod-Scorcese, right down to the cliched characters; the murderer may be slaughtering innocent women wholesale, but we don't know them - deus ex machina (or whatever the plural is) are put firmly in place to prevent anything too nasty happening to anyone we've come to identify with over two and a half hours; the initial invigorating disco energy of the soundtrack is quickly replaced by the kind of pompous, swelling score more suitable to a classical epic, signalling very different, more conventional kinds of emotions; adultery, homosexuality, drug-taking, pornography, sexual experimentation are all predictably punished in the film, seen as wrecking families and communities.
The end suggests a bag of loose ends, but is actually deeply safe (signalled in the subtle references to 'Dead End' signs). The narrator at the beginning pointed out that New York today enjoys an Indian summer of prosperity and security; that this is a tale from its sordid past. Obviously Lee is pointing to the evil potential waiting to be sprung at the first sign of a crisis that could once again paralyse New York - 22 years isn't that long ago.
But where's the ambiguity, the formal breakdown? Compare SAM with SHORT CUTS, a definitive tale(s) from the city. Altman similarly connects disparate characters into a seeming mosaic, but he is a postmodernist, and his connections only lead to fracture and despair. Lee's modernism contains.
More problematic still is the filming of the murders. Setting up lame ducks to be knocked off, however distasteful, is the only way to suggest the terrifyingly random Absurdity of the world Sam creates. Showering windscreens with blood is probably a justifiable tribute to 70s tropes of representation. Lingering on this blood, and focusing a moon to create a kind of red sky over New York is grotesque, particularly as it isn't even beautiful. Treating Sam like a fat, grunting, sweating, comic maniac/neurotic who harangues dogs doesn't help either.
On the other hand, Lee's use of this same Sam is daring - it is HE who is the film's director figure. Unseen by the other characters, his actions force them to behave in certain ways, and force their true personalities onto the surface. It is he who controls the geography and sprawling dramatic personae, and like Six Characters In Search Of An Author, his capture results in their eventual obliteration. This has terrifying implications, such is the trust Lee has placed in his omniscient filmmaking, especially when the true master seems to be a 2000 year old dog. Maybe self is less of a concern in old age.
So why does SAM feel so good? No matter how old-fashioned, any story that lingers on character can be deeply pleasureable, and if on paper they are the old familiars, the amazing actors breathe extraordinary life into them. John Leguizamo , half Garfield, half Travolta, is superb as the cocky sex-crazed religion-haunted hairdresser lead whose complacency comes to dangerously and significantly pivot the film. Adrian Brody is just as good as the punk freak with a double life; and it's wonderful to see Ben Gazzara or the beautiful Bebe Neuwirth any time.
Mira Sorvino (prompting memories of a dad who starred in many of this kind of film), though in a thankless Lorraine Bracco-type role, is long and lovely, bursting onto the screen in the first sequences after the opening murder, troubling all our preconceptions. You've got to see her in a blonde wig, and she somehow manages to convey the dowdiness and frustration of a cuckolded wife while still looking a peach. It's deeply shocking to see how 70s New York erupted, however briefly, into brutal fascism, but this latter always has its roots in crises like this, and when an impotent police ask the Mafia for help you know you're in trouble.
Each major plot incident and illuminating vignette has a novelistic density that is, I begrudgingly concede, a thrill. But only this once.
I may as well get the negative stuff out of way and so end on a celebratory note. Although more fluid than Lee's previous films, SAM's movement, especially in the opening sequences, evoke genuine masterpieces like BOOGIE NIGHTS or GOODFELLAS, and can only seem lumbering beside them. Those films used gliding camera movements, elaborate set-ups and montage so effortlessly subliminal it felt like a pan, to signify the emotional mindset of a wannabe newcomer into a strange community.
This is SAM's problem. We are not guided through the exhiliration, terror and banality of late 70s New York by a central protagonist, but by an organising external force, the opening narrator (a curmudgeonly ex-cop), the director, whoever. John Sayles managed to pull off something similar with more success in CITY OF HOPE - another tale of a city at crisis point told through the interconnected narratives of a group of characters.
The form is actually very literary (I was reminded of Tom Wolfe's novels, for example), and its tenets are very conservative. It suggests that something as unmanageably sprawling as a city, with millions of individually complex units can be made to conform to a pattern to create meaning; that problems can be controlled.
SAM is a very reassuring film: the melodramatics are cod-Scorcese, right down to the cliched characters; the murderer may be slaughtering innocent women wholesale, but we don't know them - deus ex machina (or whatever the plural is) are put firmly in place to prevent anything too nasty happening to anyone we've come to identify with over two and a half hours; the initial invigorating disco energy of the soundtrack is quickly replaced by the kind of pompous, swelling score more suitable to a classical epic, signalling very different, more conventional kinds of emotions; adultery, homosexuality, drug-taking, pornography, sexual experimentation are all predictably punished in the film, seen as wrecking families and communities.
The end suggests a bag of loose ends, but is actually deeply safe (signalled in the subtle references to 'Dead End' signs). The narrator at the beginning pointed out that New York today enjoys an Indian summer of prosperity and security; that this is a tale from its sordid past. Obviously Lee is pointing to the evil potential waiting to be sprung at the first sign of a crisis that could once again paralyse New York - 22 years isn't that long ago.
But where's the ambiguity, the formal breakdown? Compare SAM with SHORT CUTS, a definitive tale(s) from the city. Altman similarly connects disparate characters into a seeming mosaic, but he is a postmodernist, and his connections only lead to fracture and despair. Lee's modernism contains.
More problematic still is the filming of the murders. Setting up lame ducks to be knocked off, however distasteful, is the only way to suggest the terrifyingly random Absurdity of the world Sam creates. Showering windscreens with blood is probably a justifiable tribute to 70s tropes of representation. Lingering on this blood, and focusing a moon to create a kind of red sky over New York is grotesque, particularly as it isn't even beautiful. Treating Sam like a fat, grunting, sweating, comic maniac/neurotic who harangues dogs doesn't help either.
On the other hand, Lee's use of this same Sam is daring - it is HE who is the film's director figure. Unseen by the other characters, his actions force them to behave in certain ways, and force their true personalities onto the surface. It is he who controls the geography and sprawling dramatic personae, and like Six Characters In Search Of An Author, his capture results in their eventual obliteration. This has terrifying implications, such is the trust Lee has placed in his omniscient filmmaking, especially when the true master seems to be a 2000 year old dog. Maybe self is less of a concern in old age.
So why does SAM feel so good? No matter how old-fashioned, any story that lingers on character can be deeply pleasureable, and if on paper they are the old familiars, the amazing actors breathe extraordinary life into them. John Leguizamo , half Garfield, half Travolta, is superb as the cocky sex-crazed religion-haunted hairdresser lead whose complacency comes to dangerously and significantly pivot the film. Adrian Brody is just as good as the punk freak with a double life; and it's wonderful to see Ben Gazzara or the beautiful Bebe Neuwirth any time.
Mira Sorvino (prompting memories of a dad who starred in many of this kind of film), though in a thankless Lorraine Bracco-type role, is long and lovely, bursting onto the screen in the first sequences after the opening murder, troubling all our preconceptions. You've got to see her in a blonde wig, and she somehow manages to convey the dowdiness and frustration of a cuckolded wife while still looking a peach. It's deeply shocking to see how 70s New York erupted, however briefly, into brutal fascism, but this latter always has its roots in crises like this, and when an impotent police ask the Mafia for help you know you're in trouble.
Each major plot incident and illuminating vignette has a novelistic density that is, I begrudgingly concede, a thrill. But only this once.