JUNGLE FEVER
A film review by James J. DiBenedetto
Copyright 1991 James J. DiBenedetto
If you don't want to know anything at all about Spike Lee's new film, you can bail out now....
Okay, I warned you....
First off, I don't know what to think about JUNGLE FEVER. It was well done in all aspects of filming, something we've come to expect from Spike Lee. The acting was uniformly good, or better in some cases. The story was pretty tight, and there really weren't *any* wasted scenes (in almost every movie, there are what I call "wasted scenes," scenes that do nothing for the plot or the characters...).
But it seemed too, I don't know, derivative of Lee's earlier films. This film looked a *lot* like MO' BETTER BLUES, at least to me. The music was in a lot of places very much like that earlier film. And the racist morons that inhabit both Bensonhurst and Harlem, well, we've seen them before, too, in DO THE RIGHT THING.
It seems that in both JUNGLE FEVER and MO' BETTER BLUES, one of the major themes is a male "hero" who can't make the big choices in his life. Flipper (the male lead in JUNGLE FEVER, played by Wesley Snipes) doesn't decide to start a relationship with his white secretary, Angie Tucci. It just happens, and as he says later, he was just curious about what it would be like with a white girl. He doesn't decide to quit his job; it's forced on him when he is denied a deserved promotion. Nothing he does is his choice, and when the film ends, he really doesn't have anything. Angie gained independence from her family and at least a glimpse of life outside Bensonhurst. Her ex-boyfriend also got independence. But Flipper got nothing.
So, I don't know what Spike Lee was trying to say with this movie. I enjoyed it, but there were some problems. Ther whole subplot with Flipper's brother, a crack addict, was unrelated to the main plot, and seemed to take over the movie at the end. And Lee was especially unsubtle in places. Mainly, this was in the scenes where Flipper and Angie are eating together after work, and then when they have sex for the first time. The "romantic,with a dark undertone" music comes blaring on, which was unnecessary, because the pictures told us all we needed to know....
Still, I highly recommend this film....
-- James John DiBenedetto jjd3@po.cwru.edu .
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