Dear Morons,
Spike Lee is a filmmaker on a short list with directors like Herzog, Sayles, Jarmusch, Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz and the new kid, David Gordon Green. He dances to his own music. He no doubt knows all the objections that can be raised against his film. He knows that structurally it's all over the map. He knows the lesbian storyline is logically and emotionally absurd. He knows Frank Wills came in from left field. He knows he begins with a conventional drama about rotten corporations and then jumps ship. He knows all of that. He teaches film at Harvard, for chrissakes. So why did he make this movie, this way?
I could call him up and ask him, but maybe the point is to look at this film, ask myself that question and avoid the easy answer, which is that he made a preposterous movie because he didn't know any better. He knows better. He could have delivered a safe, politically correct, well-made film without even breathing hard.
But this is the work of a man who wants to dare us to deal with it. Who is confronting generic expectations, conventional wisdom and political correctness. Whose film may be an attack on the sins it seems to commit. Who is impatient with the tired rote role of the heroic African-American corporate whistleblower (he could phone that one in). Who confronts the pious liberal horror about such concepts as the inexhaustible black stud, and lesbians who respond on cue to a sex with a man -- and instead of skewering them, which would be the easy thing to do, flaunts them.
His movie seems to celebrate those forbidden ideas. Why does he do this? Perhaps because to attack those concepts would be simplistic, platitudinous and predictable. But to work without the safety net, to deliberately be offensive, to refuse to satisfy our generic expectations, to dangle the conventional formula in front of us and then yank it away, to explode the structure of the movie, to allow it to contain anger and sarcasm, impatience and wild, imprudent excess, to find room for both unapologetic, melodramatic romance and satire -- well, that's audacious. To go where this film goes and still to have the nerve to end the way he does (with a reconciliation worthy of soap opera, and the black hero making a noble speech at a congressional hearing) is a form of daring beyond all reason.
My guess is that Lee is attacking African-American male and gay/lesbian stereotypes not by conventionally preaching against them, but by boldly dramatizing them. The inspiration for "She Hate Me" may be his "Bamboozled" (2000), an attack on black stereotypes that was one of his least successful films. Having failed with a frontal assault, he returns to the battle using indirection. By getting mad at the movie, we arrive at the conclusions he intends. In a sense, he is sacrificing himself to get his message across.
Either that, or I have completely misread "She Hate Me," but I couldn't write the obvious review. I couldn't convince myself I believed it. This film is alive and confrontational and aggressively in our face, and the man who made it has abandoned all caution, even to the point of refusing to signal his intentions, to put in a wink to let us see he knows what he's doing.
Love,
Roger Ebert
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