Table Talk: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee’s Return to Peak Form?

Anton: The other weekend, I had a Spike Lee double-feature. 

On Friday, June 12, the day of its Netflix premiere…

Anders: On my birthday!

Anton: ... Anders and I watched Lee’s latest feature, Da 5 Bloods, about a group of African-American Vietnam War veterans who return to Vietnam in the present day to not only repatriate the body of their fallen squad leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), but also to obtain the gold they hid in the jungle all those years ago. 

Da 5 Bloods has a strongly positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes (as of this posting, 91%), and while not everyone adores it, some have already declared it the movie of the year. With waves of anti-racism protests still rolling across America, it certainly hits home.

As a follow-up to Da 5 Bloods, on Saturday night I finally caught up with Lee’s most acclaimed feature in decades, BlacKkKlansman (2018), which was nominated for Best Picture and won Best Adapted Screenplay. With some not-so-subtle criticisms levelled against Trump and an ending containing footage of the horror in Charlottesville in August 2017, this account of a black police officer working with a white partner to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs also plays incredibly topically. 

Clearly Spike Lee is back in a big way. What is it? Does our moment’s cultural emphasis on anti-racism make his work more relevant, or is it just that he’s put together some of his best work lately?

Anders: I think it’s undeniable that after a decade or more of films that were mostly panned (his Oldboy remake) or overlooked (I still haven’t seen Chi-raq or Da Sweet Blood of Jesus), Spike Lee has returned to prominence, even if his form never entirely left him. I think some of it is connected to the current cultural climate of post-Obama Trumpism, where Spike Lee’s biting critique of American institutional racism has at least a perceived renewed currency. But some of it is also that he is one of the few big directors who is still tackling ambitious subject matter and has a legacy of greatness.

It also certainly helps that he has gotten some production support and money that he hasn’t gotten in the last few decades, with the Blumhouse and Jordan Peele produced BlacKkKlansman and now with Netflix on Da 5 Bloods (his first collaboration with the streaming giant was a serial remake of his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, which I enjoyed the first season of). These two recent films are also clearly framed, at least on the surface, as popular genre films: cop-drama and war movie. I think this has helped them to find an audience that they might not otherwise.

Anton: Yes, that’s important. Both these films operate as genre works, which helps them reach a wide audience.

Anders: But it’s also a function of a director drawing on his long legacy and deep knowledge of film history to make films that speak to more than just a single moment. Not unlike some of the recent works of Lee’s friend Martin Scorsese, both BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods interrogate and pay homage to the history of cinema, both in the broader American Hollywood cinema tackling titans like Birth of a Nation or Apocalypse Now respectively, and the director’s own personal filmography: Lee has said that he has long wanted to make a film about the African-American Vietnam War experience, and he finally tackles it here, and a lot more!

Anton: Both of Lee’s recent films continue his work as chronicler of African American history, and both also testify to his deeply knowledgeable engagement with film history, as we’ll get to below.

A Disjointed Narrative?

Anton: While Da 5 Bloods may continue Lee’s resurgence, comparing the film to BlacKkKlansman reveals it to be a step down in just plain effectiveness as a work of entertainment. I found it disjointed and drawn out and primarily engaging in terms of ideas and in individual scenes than as a total work and story.

Anders: I can’t disagree that the major criticism one can level at Da 5 Bloods is that it feels both overstuffed and yet also drags a bit in the middle. It’s like Lee doesn’t want to leave anything out, and yet my interest wanes in a number of scenes, especially in the middle 40 minutes, during both of my watches. Like you, I don’t think it’s at the level of BlacKkKlansman.

You see this overstuffed aspect also in the formal technique that Lee uses here of inserting historical photos and information about black history whenever characters reference things. For instance, the story of Crispus Attucks, the African American who was the first person to die during the American Revolution in the Boston Massacre. I loved the opening of the film, using the iconic imagery of the Vietnam War (or American War as the Vietnamse call it) to set the stage before the dissolve to present day Ho Chi Minh City. But at times the desire to include all the references distracts from the story of the film. Maybe that’s intentional? It’s almost Brechtian in the way that it draws your attention to history and instructs you. Some might bristle at Lee’s didacticism, but I’m willing to give it a pass for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think a lot of it is genuinely information that a lot of people don’t know, but also there’s an enthusiasm, Lee’s personality comes through in his desire to educate and inform.

I think that also speaks to the fact that this film even in its over-stuffed narrative, has a real auteur flare. It’s notable that neither Da 5 Bloods or BlacKkKlansman originated with Lee, with screenplays existing before he came on board, and in the case of Da 5 Bloods radically remodelled the basic story of Vietnam vets going back to present day Vietnam to recover a cargo of gold to be about the African American experience. 

Anton: That’s interesting. I didn’t know he didn’t generate the initial ideas for each movie. Because they seem like ideas right up his alleys.

Anders: But in attempting to say everything, it becomes apparent how one can’t actually do it all in one movie. How do you centre the experience of black vets and the role black soldiers have played in the creation of America while at the same time critiquing American imperialism? It’s a bit muddled, but I think the film’s messiness doesn’t sink it for a couple reasons we’ll get to in a bit, mostly for the messy and conflicted central character of Paul (Delroy Lindo).

Anton: See, that for me is part of the problem with Lee’s didacticism. He wants to make strong, bold, clear statements about black oppression in American, while at the same time casting shadow and nuance on so many things, such as the strange connections between the Black liberation movement and the anti-colonial dimension of the Viet Cong. Is he exposing connections or contradictions? Does his celebration of the African American contribution to the Vietnam War jar with his critique of US imperialism? He’s trying to shed light on aspects of history while also pulling on a lot of threads and trying to tie various things together. And I’m not sure he’s entirely successful at balancing all his efforts and messages, even if it’s worth it for all the thoughts he provokes.

Flashbacks

Anders: What did you think of the use of different aspect ratios and film stock for the past and present?

I think I liked the flashback sequences better than you did. The transitions between the past and present in a few moments are really interesting, the way the aspect ratio slowly expands or contracts and the film grain of the 16mm stock contrasts against the digital sharpness of the present day story.

Anton: The flashback sequences are fine, but on the whole I was less impressed with them than with the present-day narrative. I’m not sure the aspect-ratio or film-stock changes add anything other than greater clarification and redundancy for the audience in terms of narration, since it’s not like Lee is choosing to actually shoot the scenes set in the past like films from the past. The camerawork and such remains pretty consistent, so the changes are flashy and neat, sure, but I don’t think it really adds much depth or meaning.

Anders: The film makes it clear that the past sequences are to some degree imagined and rooted in the characters’ memories. For instance, the most formally daring choice is to not de-age or recast the younger versions of the four main Bloods in the flashback sequences (apart from a final still photo of the original Bloods). It reminds me a bit of the scenes in something like A Christmas Carol or Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, where you have the presence of the old character in the memory. Except here, they are right in it rather than just observing.

Some have criticised this as proof of a lack of institutional support for Lee, not giving him the money that Scorsese got to digitally de-age DeNiro and Pacino in The Irishman, but I think it’s a specific choice that reinforces how we can’t take remembrances at face value. The past is always filtered though memory, whether personal or cultural. 

Anton: That’s a good point. I also think we actually have to know the production history specifics before we rush to judgement about Lee lacking support from Netflix for the artistic choices he wanted to make. If that was the case in actuality, then that’s unfortunate, but do we know? 

It’s also worth noting that I disliked the so-called de-aging in The Irishman. I don’t think it worked for Scorsese. We can smooth an old man’s skin with CGI, but we can’t make his bones and muscles move like a 20-year-old’s. Like the scene when DeNiro drags the guy out of the grocery shop to beat him—it’s clear that we are seeing an old man move.

To get back to the topic on hand, I think Lee’s approach to the flashbacks—to simply use the same older actors in the scenes set in the past—is actually more effective, because the strategy more explicitly frames the flashbacks as memories rather than narrative movements backwards in time. And this helps to clarify the sometimes overly grandiose nature of the dialogue and acting in those flashback scenes, in comparison to the present day story.

The Power of Movies

Anders: I think that the casting of Chadwick Boseman as “Stormin’” Norman is really brilliant and shows how Lee is really drawing on our experience of cinema to explore the Vietnam War here. Boseman is great in his role. Honestly, on a re-watch I’d say he’s one of the best parts of the movie in his portrayal of the fallen compatriot of these four vets. One cannot divorce the fact that Boseman has already taken on a kind of symbolic function for black actors on screen. As Black Panther, he is clearly the biggest black superhero of all time (in one of the biggest superhero films of all time), but also throw in his role as Jackie Robinson in 42: Boseman represents the hero, the ideal, the pure soul. And Norman’s alignment in the film with Martin Luther King Jr. is also interesting. Norman dies not long after they learn MLK does on Radio Hanoi, during the broadcasts of Hanoi Hannah (played by Van Veronica Ngo, who portrayed Rose Tico’s sister Paige in the opening of Star Wars: The Last Jedi).

Anton: What I didn’t love about the portrayal was how superheroic Norman was. He seemed so much less real than the other members of the squad, but I guess that’s the point. It’s their memory of their heroic friend and leader.

Anders: Also, the film recognizes how other movies shape our understanding of history. Apocalypse Now looms large over the film from the opening scenes at the real-life Apocalypse Now nightclub in Ho Chi Minh City to the use of “Flight of the Valkyrie” as they head up river on the boat. It’s not just the viewer or Lee who is shaped by this, but the veterans themselves. In one scene Paul and Otis (Clarke Peters) talk about which Vietnam movies are bullshit, but clearly Hollywood’s portrayal of the war mixes with the characters’ own remembrances. There’s one scene near the end of the film that also references Brando’s famous “The horror, the horror” moment.

Anton: The connection between movies and real life is an important theme at the end of BlacKkKlansman as well.

Anders: Generically, while the film might be a war movie, it’s also a kind of buddy comedy in moments, with a bunch of characters reuniting on a trip ala The Hangover. But the film that plays the biggest influence in the broad strokes is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, because the plot of the film is really put in motion as the greed for gold exacerbates the underlying tensions between the characters, including the fact that Paul’s anger and pain has led him to becoming a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter.

Anton: That’s a good connection to point out. It’s also important because, if you recall, a theme of Sierra Madre is US soft imperialism in South America, with all the main characters, including Bogie, being Yankees looking to get some gold in a foreign land. That Hollywood classic also features a lot of tension between its Yankee adventurers, the Latin Americans (both citizens and bandits), and the Indigenous peoples. So, the allusions to that film in Lee’s narrative add to Da 5 Bloods’ effect as a critique of US imperialism.

Anders: Finally, the film is a movie about fathers and sons, as Paul’s son David, played by Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) comes along on the trip and the fraught relationship between father and son shapes the narrative.

Anton: Yes, just from what we’ve mentioned here, this movie is tackling a lot. It’s a shame Denzel and John David Washington couldn’t have played the two characters. On the other hand, Delroy Lindo as Paul really steals the show. 

Action Scenes and Musical Score

Anton: Turning back to the effectiveness of Da 5 Bloods as a war movie and work of entertainment, I found the action sequences to be pretty lackluster and lacking in comprehension. Lee’s efforts at sort of a Saving Private Ryan style chaos just didn’t work for me.

Anders: They aren’t anything groundbreaking, it’s true. But I think they are as much indebted to the kind of action scenes in Vietnam movies like Platoon as Saving Private Ryan. They’re actually pretty clearly framed in comparison with the chaos of Spielberg’s film, and even compared to the playing around with continuity and even breaking the 180º line in early scenes in Ho Chi Minh City.

Anton: I didn’t find Lee’s scenes to be that combination of order and chaos that Spielberg commands in Private Ryan. I also found that the Terrance Blanchard score, typically brass heavy, didn’t work for me in the film, especially in the war scenes. We get this overwrought music when their helicopter first comes under fire and the whole scene plays lamely for me, like almost a parody of a war movie.

Whereas, I found Marvin Gaye’s songs worked quite well throughout the film.

Anders: Yeah, I agree on the Gaye stuff, though I actually really liked Blanchard’s score. I agree it could be called overwrought, but I think that this film isn’t ultimately going for realism. It’s about heightened emotions and the responses that we have to such things in films. It reminds me of some of John Williams’ work with Oliver Stone, and the reference to Stone’s Vietnam films with the snare drum and military sounds. Especially in the films’ final sequences, the score really does tie together.

The use of Marvin Gaye is great, because it’s a reminder of how the stuff Marvin was singing back during the war is still relevant today. And in the film’s emotional climax, when Paul is confronted by the memory or ghost of Norman in the present day and he forgives Paul, in one of the most clear Christ-figures in Lee’s films, with “God is Love, Love is God.” It’s an echo of the title of Marvin’s song, “God is Love” that is used earlier in the film.

Black Lives Matter and Anti-Imperialism

Anton: The movie does a good job of tying together some issues and themes for audiences that probably escape many viewers, even if they are fairly established in, say, a postcolonial studies university class. 

Anders: Yes, Lee does a good job of making people think about things that they may not have considered, around the issues of black soldiers and the relationship to the American war machine and even the subplot of Otis having a child with the Vietnamese woman, Tiên, who he reconnects with. The way that anti-black attitudes exist even amongst the Vietnamese is referenced.

Anton: Something I didn’t quite follow was, who were those Vietnamese militia in the jungle? The Viet Cong? Are they still active? It didn’t quite make sense to me.

Anders: I believe that they are just gangsters whose fathers were VC. In fact one criticism I’ve read levelled against the whole scene is that real-life Vietnamese gangs would never go on about My Lai, they’d just kill you right there and then!

However, I think it gestures at the most significant major criticisms that can be levelled at the film: that ultimately, just like other Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War, in this film’s effort to centre on the experiences of American soldiers and the black American experience in the war, Vietnam and its people once again simply become a backdrop for American self-discovery and the working out of their emotions, history, and trauma. There’s little reflection on why America was there or whether they should be. 

And that the Vietnamese people in the film are, for the most part, props, whether it’s the mine-injured beggar in the nightclub at the beginning or the gangsters drawing on the legacy of fear of the VC.

I mean, while Paul says that the use of n-word by black soldiers justifies his use of the extremely racist term “gook” to refer to the Vietnamese, I don’t think film goes as far as it could in interrogating the way that imperial wars reinforce racist attitudes toward different groups. Yes, tens of thousands of African Americans were exploited by the US military, what about the more than a quarter million South Vietnamese allied soldiers who were killed? The film brings up the very true fact that African American soldiers died a rate higher than their white colleagues, but the brunt of the deaths on the US side was by far borne by the Vietnamese.

Ultimately, I guess it can be chalked up to Lee’s desire to tell the story of black soldiers, and the inability to tell everyone’s story. Maybe because the film is so over-stuffed, it felt a bit like more could have been done, but at the same time I kinda end up liking the film’s messiness.

Anton, you told me the other day that while Lee is didactic in real life and even in his films, the films themselves stand as documents that actually are more complicated and less moralizing than Lee is himself. I think that Da 5 Bloods likewise is very complicated, summed up in the figure of Paul, who is living with his own self-loathing at his participation in, not only the war itself, but the death of his friend and the desire to find some measure of forgiveness. Paul’s own Trump support can be read as a kind of over-determined desire to own some of that American legacy with MAGA.

Anton: I just think BlacKkKlansman is the best example of Lee finding the right balance between message, form, and entertainment. It’s a rip-roaring thriller as well as a harrowing critique. Whereas, the reason I don’t think Da 5 Bloods is top-tier Lee is that it’s too much message and too complicated a critique, while being somewhat ineffective as an adventure.

Anders: I think that’s fair. I’m a very big admirer of what Lee pulls off in his previous film. But the reason I end up liking the film a great deal is its message of forgiveness amongst the messiness. The film doesn’t have “perfect” representation, but in attempting to tackle so much, it replicates the messiness of real-life and how we try to find some redemption or forgiveness even amongst the messiness. Does that make sense?

Da 5 Bloods (USA, 2020)

Directed by Spike Lee; written by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee; starring Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, Jasper Pääkkönen, Johnny Nguyen, Lê Y Lan, Sandy Huong Pham, Jean Reno.

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