She's Gotta Have It Directed by Spike Lee
A film review by Chris Loar Copyright 1998 Chris Loar
At a time when so-called independent cinema appears to be experiencing something of a renaissance, it's refreshing to turn back the clock and look at a few _really_ independent films -- shot, edited, and marketed without any support or guidance from the major corporate players in the film industry on budgets that sound more like household budgets than public works outlays. These films, not surprisingly, don't always have the cut and dried spit and polish tidiness of even a more low-key Hollywood production, but what they lack in grace they often make up for in originality, wit, and energy. All this could certainly be said of Spike Lee's first feature, _She's Gotta Have It_, which he shot with mostly amateur actors for less than $200,000. The film has countless flaws -- I certainly won't bother to recount them all here, since most of them are immediately obvious and none of them take anything away from the things that make the film worth seeing -- the freshness and energy it draws from its independence and originality.
The storyline of _She's Gotta_ is fairly straightforward; girl meets boy, girl meets another boy, girl meets yet another boy, girl enjoys the company of all three and refuses to give any of them up. In this case the girl is Nola Darling (a charismatic performance by Tracy Camilla Johns), an independent-minded, free- spirited graphic designer living in a spacious apartment in Brooklyn with lots of candles and a bed where she sleeps every night -- rarely alone. As the film opens, she's narrowed her stable of men down to three regulars -- the shallow, narcissistic Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell); the goofy, juvenile Mars Blackmon (played without much stretching by Spike Lee himself); and the stable, committed Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks). Nola finds satisfactions in each of her lovers, seeing them as somehow parts of one whole. She is consistently straightforward and honest with all three men about where they stand: she will not part with any of them. As she puts it, "It's really about control, my body, my mind. Who was going to own it? Them? Or me? I'm not a one-man woman. Bottom line."
This, in a nutshell, is the film's plot. The narrative isn't emphatically linear; the primary tension is located more in short jolts and sequences which drive the males' (rather ironic) desire for monogamy into the immovable force of Nola's libido. Nola will not give in, not even for Jamie, the only one of the three for whom she feels a real adult love. The results often walk along that fence that divides comic territory from tragedy, as when Nola invites her three partners over for Thanksgiving dinner. The proceedings, spiced up by Greer's hysterical parody of self- satisfaction and Mars's comedy of insecurity, are often sharply funny, but Jamie's more straightforward pain combines with Nola's earnest desire for peace and harmony to season the comedy with genuine pain and a sense of loss.
In the end, it's not clear that all this laughter and pain add up to a great deal. Lee here hasn't yet mastered his storytelling skills, and the film's conclusion, in particular, feels arbitrary -- a cop-out in which tensions are resolved and then magically un-resolved again. But the way Lee constructs individual scenes is a real pleasure to watch. Much of the story is told in a series of pseudo-documentary flashbacks, with actors often addressing the camera directly to explain their point of view. This technique gives a flavor of authenticity to the film -- it feels "real" -- and gives the film a touch of informality and looseness, inviting us to relax and stop worrying -- after all, we're all just talking here, right? Indeed, even the film's failings (the rough-hewn acting, the sometimes clumsy writing) enhance this feeling of informality, leaving the impression of something less processed and less sterile than the typical Hollywood market-tested product.
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