Juneteenth 2020: “When They See Us”.

Juneteenth seems a good day to muse about how far Americans have come in the struggle for Black liberation, and how very far we still have to go. When I was in school, this day commemorating the end of slavery across the U.S.A. was never once mentioned. We all understood that slavery had ended, once and for all, in 1865. It took a while, until the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, for us to grasp that African-Americans, though technically free, were far from equal in the eyes of the law.

Flash forward to 2020. In the wake of the murder of George Lloyd by a member of the Minneapolis Police Department, we’re all taking stock, yet again, of the American response to its Black citizenry. The last few weeks have seen some forward progress, everything from peaceful protests by people of all colors to the news that Aunt Jemima – the benignly beaming Mammy figure on the box of pancake mix – is going off to that Great Plantation in the Sky. But, of course, injustices continue. More harsh rhetoric, more cold-blooded killings by cops who should certainly know better.

.Given what’s going on, this seemed an apt time to catch up with a TV mini-series from 2019, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us. This four-part drama explores the case of a jogger who was brutally raped and left for dead in New York’s Central Park in 1989. I remember the headlines at the time: the horror I felt at the notion that a group of African American teenagers, “wilding” in the park on a warm April evening, could so viciously attack a defenseless white female. The NYPD quickly swooped in and made a number of arrests. After the trials and convictions, I was glad to think of the gang who had become known as the  Central Park Five as safely beyond bars for a long time to come.

Only problem: there was absolutely no forensic evidence linking the five young men (one of them barely 14) to the attack on the jogger. Yes, they had  confessed to a multitude of crimes, but only after long hours of intense questioning, with their parents and attorneys nowhere in sight. DuVernay’s drama is at perhaps its most infuriating when we see exhausted boys, desperate to go home, being manipulated by police into naming one another as accomplices, even though most began the evening as complete strangers.

DuVernay’s drama, produced by such showbiz luminaries as Robert DeNiro, Oprah Winfrey, and screenwriter Robin Swicord, focuses on the five young men both before their conviction and after their release. It’s painful to see the extent to which they (and their families) are traumatized long after their release by the injustice they’ve suffered. Their stories are not identical, and DuVernay and her team do a superb job of intecutting their varied experiences into a powerful mosaic. For instance, when Raymond Santana is released from the youth authority after serving his six-year sentence, he comes home to an overcrowded apartment where his father has a hostile new wife and a toddler. But the most gripping footage involves the oldest of the boys, Korey Wise (played by Emmy-winner Jharrel Jerome) who for fourteen years suffered through the horrors of the New York prison system.

Some of the details seen on-screen have been disputed. Lead prosecutor Linda Fairstein, played by a coldly self-righteous Felicity Huffman, has cited factual errors and sued for defamation. But the abuses of young Black men by the police and prison systems are too glaring to dismiss. I will not soon forget what I have seen.

What’s Goin’ On: The Many-Hatted Saga of “Da 5 Bloods”

I don’t know how Spike Lee does it. Just when our national concern about social justice has reached a boiling point, he comes out with a film that addresses the very issues that make this moment so fraught. Lee knows his American history, both the widely shared events and the more hidden ones. He knows about Dr. King and Malcolm X. And he knows about Hanoi Hannah cajoling Black soldiers to reject the patriotic rhetoric that promotes the official American view of the Vietnam War. His new film, Da 5 Bloods, opens with a clip of Muhammad Ali noting that no Viet Cong ever called him nigger.

Lee has over 90 directing credits, and I can’t pretend that this is his very best work. Part of what makes his career so memorable is that, while devoting himself to chronicling the Black American experience, he has tried out so many approaches. He’s shot distinguished documentaries (Four Little Girls) and biopics (Malcolm X). He’s focused on Black music (Mo’ Betta Blues), Black religion (Red Hook Summer), and Black contributions to sports. (He Got Game). I love the sexy humor in his comic take on the streets and the bedrooms of Brooklyn, She’s Gotta Have It. And I doubt there’s a more powerful look at the rage in our streets than 1989’s Do the Right Thing.

Lee can be long-winded, with a tendency to go off in all directions. Two items in the Lee canon I most admire, 2006’s Inside Man and 2018’s BlacKkKlansman, are disciplined  police thrillers that pack a wallop because they’re tightly written and edited. They’re hardly without meaning, but they never wander off from the subject at hand. By contrast, Da 5 Bloods is Homeric in its scope, covering a multitude of issues. This story of a squad of Black grunts returning to Vietnam fifty years later to find the remains of their fallen leader is at the same time a sentimental journey, an adventure saga, and a deeply poignant father/son tale. The film is also a history lesson, bookended as it is by footage of fallen Black leaders as well as shots of people of color bearing the burdens of a questionable war.. One chief plot strand, focusing on the challenges posed by human greed, is deeply reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (We can’t miss it, because Lee makes a joke reference to that classic’s most famous line.) In all, Da 5 Bloods is a mishmash of styles and subjects: it’s a bit formless, but never less than fascinating.

What’s special about Da 5 Bloods, apart from its timeliness and its ambitions? The breathtaking beauty of its landscape scenes owes much to the cinematography of a new Lee collaborator, Newton Thomas Sigel. (Among his previous films is Drive, which turned L.A. into a place of seedy wonder.) There’s also, unusual for a Lee film, a big orchestral score by longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard, which co-exists with a powerful rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On.” And then there are the performers, led by Delroy Lindo, a frequent Lee supporting player who shines here in the central role.

Lindo’s character, Paul, shows more than any of the others how deeply warfare can etch itself into the human psyche. Vietnam is a battle he can never get past. Pointedly, Paul is a guy wearing a “Make America Great Again” red cap. Lee publicly loathes the president he calls “Agent Orange,” and by making a PTSD-riddled Black man a Trump supporter  he makes sure we all know what’s goin’ on in his own mind.

Women in the Middle . . . of a Nervous Breakdown

You can’t think of two more dissimilar film projects than the 2018 indie comedy, Support the Girls , and the oblique new thriller, Shirley. They have, though, one thing in common: both feature mid-life women in positions of authority who are striving mightily to cope with the hand they were dealt.

Support the Girls is a big-hearted (and big-busted) romp set in a down-home sports bar that features nubile young waitresses in short shorts and skimpy pink T-shirts. (Think a localized version of Hooters.) The clientele is mostly blue-collar: they’re loud and raucous, but generally harmless, and everyone is constantly being reminded that this is a family place. Riding herd over the goings-on is general manager and mother hen Lisa (the highly appealing Regina Hall), who in the course of one highly-charged day faces every imaginable problem, from a cable-TV malfunction to a would-be burglar in the air duct to a ditsy employee who’s just violated company rules by getting a huge tattoo of basketball star Steph Curry on her midriff.

Though Lisa is quick to listen to everyone else’s problems, she’s got plenty of troubles of her own, including a depressed spouse who’s on the brink of moving out. She tries to organize an off-the-books carwash to assist a battered young woman who’s a member of her crew, but the good deed blows up in her face. And her redneck boss can be crude and downright nasty. It doesn’t help that she’s African-American. So she  feels rankled by such absurd policies as the rule that allows only one waitress of color on any shift. By the time she’s been fired (yet again) by her capricious superior, there seems nothing for it but to interview for a job with an upstart rival hot spot named Man Cave. What keeps her going, though, is the camaraderie she feels with the “girls” who have been under her wing.

Sbirley couldn’t be more different in its tone and its atmosphere. It’s basically a four-hander, set in the leafy college town of Bennington, Vermont circa 1950. Two couples living in the same large, rambling house form an unlikely quartet. Rose and Fred are newlyweds. She is newly pregnant; he has been hired by Bennington College as a young prof and assistant to a faculty superstar, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (played with panache and conviction by Michael Stuhlbarg). Stanley’s deeply neurotic wife and verbal sparring partner is Shirley Jackson, already the author of an unforgettably eerie story, “The Lottery.” She’s on the brink of writing her second novel and moving toward such major gothic fiction as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley is played by the hugely versatile Elisabeth Moss, lightyears away from her naive but determined  Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Though the philandering Stanley has his pick of the campus coeds, the center of the ménage is Shirley, with her barbed witticisms, unexpected kindnesses, and tendency to dominate any gathering she’s in. There’s something of a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf quality at work, with the older couple manipulating the younger one for their own emotional satisfaction. But Shirley is also—first and foremost—a writer, and her fascination with Rose takes on a life of its own as she weaves it into her current manuscript.

The real Jackson/Hyman marriage, as chronicled in Ruth Franklin’s prize-winning biography, contained four children who are definitely not in evidence here. But the perverse aspects of the actual marital relationship are used by the filmmakers to shed a dark light on this fascinating film.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss (she looks remarkably like the real Shirley Jackson)