It is absurd that as recently as the eighties there was no
prominent African-American voice in Hollywood. Just months before that decade
ended, Spike Lee finally snatched the megaphone with the film that made him a
household name, and it did so without playing nice with the establishment. Lee
presented a particularly sweltering day in Bed-Stuy where tempers rise with the
mercury and ultimately boil over into murder and a racially charged clash at an
Italian-owned pizzeria in a largely black community.
Lee casts himself as Mookie, an employee of Sal’s Famous
Pizzeria and the film’s focal point. Lee does a good job in front of the
camera, though it is the rest of the outstanding cast (Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie
Perez, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Joie Lee, Richard Edson, Bill
Nunn, Frankie Faisson, Robin Harris, Danny Aiello, and the especially
electrifying Giancarlo Esposito) that really zaps it to life. Do the Right Thing still belongs to Lee,
who not only turns in a provocative script, but also films it with unbridled
imagination and energy, his camera zooming and tilting like an untethered falcon,
his subjects staring down that camera to confront the audience directly, to
muse about hate and love.
While Do the Right Thing
bounces with some fairly animated performances to match its almost cartoonish
style and energy, the character relationships are hardly two-dimensional. Open-ended
debates between characters such as Mookie and Buggin’ Out, ML and Sweet Dick Willy,
and Ahmad and Da Mayor respect the audience enough to allow us to decide who’s right.
Lee similarly and audaciously refuses to serve up pat solutions to the film’s complex
central issue: is the best way to improve a racist system working within that
system in accordance with its rules or taking more radical action (the very
question with which the political left is currently struggling)?
A new 30th anniversary Blu-ray of this important
film is sufficiently lavish, though Criterion really didn’t have to do much
heavy lifting, at least not in terms of supplements. That’s because both
Criterion and Universal had already released heavily supplemented editions of Do the Right Thing, and this new edition
ports over all of the numerous extras from those 2001 and 2009 editions. The
only new bonuses are an interesting 30 minute appreciation featuring the film’s
assistant cameraperson Darnell Martin, writer /producer/serial-talking head
Nelson George, and Robert Cornegy, the councilman who represents Bed Stuy
currently, and an interview with costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who discusses
both the picture’s super-1989 wardrobe and her impressions of Lee and his film.
This double-disc set also boasts an exceptionally fat booklet featuring an
extensive excerpt from Lee’s production journal in addition to the obligatory
retrospective essay. However, the main attraction of Criterion’s new Do the Right Thing Blu-ray is a very
nice 4K restoration that brings back the film’s steamier tones of red and gold after
Universal brighter yet less authentic 20th Anniversary Blu-ray.
