TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/112392/1123420.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8KB | 166 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 64

The Elevation of Malcolm X


A much hyped film turns a complex militant's life into an
overlong, tepid primer for black pride

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Martha Smilgis/
Los Angeles


    The movie's first minutes promise the fire this time. A
Patton-size U.S. flag fills the screen and is set ablaze. Video
clips of Los Angeles cops pummeling a helpless Rodney King are
underlaid with the words of Malcolm X fulminating against the
white devil. Flames of black rage gnaw at the fabric of the flag
until it is burned into a huge X. America, the image says,
created Malcolm X in a centuries-old crucible of race hatred.
And the legacy of Malcolm, murdered in 1965, helped define the
battered field of today's Stars and Stripes.

    Spike Lee is a logo maker of genius. It seems as if half
the T shirts worn by American kids tout Lee's BUTTON YOUR FLY
campaign for Levi's jeans, and half of the baseball caps carry
the defiant initial X -- a clever device that raised
consciousness of Malcolm and, not incidentally, advertised Lee's
movie biography a year before its release.

    Now the film arrives, in more than the usual storm of
tumult and hype that attends the premiere of a Spike Lee Joint.
Even before shooting began, Lee conferred with Black Muslim
minister Louis Farrakhan, an early associate of Malcolm's who
has vexed many with his antiwhite, anti-Jewish harangues. Lee
also hired a Black Muslim security force as bodyguards on the
set. He fought publicly with his distributor (Warner Bros.) and
insurer (the Completion Bond Co.) when work on the overbudget
film was suspended. Then he solicited and received gifts from
black entertainers (Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey) to help him
complete postproduction. He urged kids to skip school and see
Malcolm X on its opening day. He discouraged white reporters
from interviewing him about the film. Whatever rancorous agenda
this served, it got the film's name in the papers. Lee is also
a self-promoter of genius.

    He is no filmmaker of genius. And yet you have to cherish,
like a guilty conscience, any writer-director who can outrage
so many people with a melodrama set in the ghetto tinderbox (Do
the Right Thing), a musical about skin-tone prejudice among
blacks (School Daze), an interracial love and lust story
(Jungle Fever).

    So the big surprise about Malcolm X is how ordinary it is.
The film is a lavish, linear, way-too-long (3 hr. 21 min.)
storybook of Malcolm's career, the movie equivalent of an
authorized biography, a cautious primer for black pride. It is
Lee's biggest film, and the least Spikey. At one point in
producer Marvin Worth's 26-year hajj to get this movie made, and
before he was persuaded that an African American should direct
the movie, Norman Jewison (A Soldier's Story) wanted to do it.
If Jewison had, the product would be about the same. Only the
label would be different.

    The lure of movie biography is to show the contours in a
life of significance. Working from a screenplay written in the
late '60s by James Baldwin and Arnold Perl, Lee splays
Malcolm's story across a 40-year panorama of Americana (the film
cost $34 million, but it looks twice as expensive and
expansive). In the mid-'20s, Malcolm Little's parents are
threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. In the '30s he finds both
acceptance and isolation in white foster homes and white
schools. In the '40s Malcolm (embodied with potent charm by
Denzel Washington) is a rakish dude, running numbers and lording
it over his white mistress Sophia. In the '50s he finds Allah
in jail and becomes a minister of the Black Muslim faith under
the sect's founder, Elijah Muhammad. In the '60s, with the
encouragement of his wife Betty, he breaks from the racist
Nation of Islam and pays for this social enlightenment with his
life.

    Lee sketches Malcolm's life colorfully, if by the numbers.
But he falls victim to the danger of movie biography: he
elevates Malcolm's importance until the vital historical context
is obscured. Malcolm came of age in an era of great black
oratory. Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell,
Eldridge Cleaver, Maya Angelou had no power but in their minds
and throats and pens. And what force, what rage, what music they
found there!

    Malcolm's style was cooler than King's, more lawyerly than
evangelical; its bitter logic cut like a knife at the throat of
complacent white America. Even in the time of Malcolm's most
toxic demagoguery -- defaming liberals as white devils, civil
rights heroes as Uncle Toms and Jews for sapping "the very
lifeblood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of
Israel" -- his steely charisma beguiled the white media. In
Harlem he was something more than a diversion: he was the
prophet of the black male underclass. "It was manhood time,"
says Al Freeman Jr., who played Malcolm in the TV mini-series
Roots II and is Elijah Muhammad here.

    Lee could have scared folks by foregrounding Malcolm's
seductive racism. But he takes the safe route, viewing his
subject less as a flamethrower of incendiary rhetoric than as
a victim. Until his late break with the Black Muslims, Malcolm
is mostly a tool: of white racists, black gangsters, jail-cell
preachers and the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm's uniqueness is
lost, his personality blurred. He begins as Little and ends as
X: still the unknown.

    Lee is more a producer -- a hustler after the big picture,
an entrepreneur of scalding emotions -- than a director. As
such, he is not one to attend to the shading of character. As
Washington says, "He basically left me alone and let me run with
it." Lee's moods had opposite effects on the excellent actresses
who play Malcolm's wife and his white hussy. "He laughs, laughs
large," says Angela Bassett (Betty). "He's energy plus." But
Kate Vernon (Sophia) says, "He was belligerent and disrespectful
in tone toward me. There's a boys' club, and women are not
allowed -- especially white women. I hated the idea of feeling
excluded because I was white. The set was tense. I've heard all
his sets are tense."

    If that is so, it is because the director sees so much
riding on each of his films: the future of cinema, precious
testimony from an African-American perspective and, not least,
the reputation -- carefully nourished, always vulnerable -- of
Spike Lee. "Spike was on the set," recalls an observer who was
close to the shooting, "and a guy comes up and tells him, `I
know you! I saw your film -- Boyz N the Hood.' " Lee was miffed,
but the crew members laughed seditiously. They surely knew that
John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood earned about as much money as
Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing did together. Lee doesn't
care to be overtaken by the young black directors whose careers
his success helped make possible.

    Nor would he settle for a Malcolm-like niche in movie
history: the radical prophet who achieved his stature
posthumously. Lee would rather be a top-grossing auteur now than
a biopic subject later. Perhaps that is why his movie is so
stately, reverent and academic, so suitable for the Oscars with
which Hollywood rewards high-minded mediocrity. Some other
director will have to find a way to merge the danger of a
brilliant, racist orator with the seismic jolt of energized
filmmaking. That picture will be worth skipping school for.

    Moviegoers may accept Lee's burning logo and tepid
melodrama as cinema's vision of Malcolm X now. They can hope for
the fire next time.