SUMMER OF SAM (Touchstone) Starring: John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Rispoli, Michael Badalucco. Screenplay: Victor Colicchio, Michael Imperioli and Spike Lee. Producers: Jon Kilik and Spike Lee. Director: Spike Lee. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, adult themes, drug use, violence) Running Time: 136 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I see Spike Lee working. I have a pretty good idea what he was up to with SUMMER OF SAM. This would his a saga of a more dangerous New York circa 1977, when the Big Apple was more famous for muggings than for musicals. It would be a tale of how paranoia can amplify the xenophobia that already exists in so many people. It would be a story of one very specific demon -- "Son of Sam" serial killer David Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco) -- which also explored the demons many of us keep hidden just beneath the surface. It would be an examination of the uncomfortable link between the criminal and the tabloid media that exploited him. It would be both ambitious and intimate, both a period piece and a piece of who we still are. It would be an Important Film.
I see Spike Lee working, and I saw SUMMER OF SAM working...up to a point. His account (co-written with Victor Colicchio and Micheal Imperioli) of New York's hot, hellish summer of '77 focuses on two Bronx neighborhood buddies and their relationships. Vinny (John Leguizamo) is a hairdresser with trouble remaining faithful in his marriage to Dionna (Mira Sorvino); Ritchie (Adrien Brody) is a would-be punk rocker who has moved to the Village and taken up with Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), a neighborhood girl with a "reputation." Though they now live in different worlds -- Vinny's a little bit Studio 54, Ritchie's a little bit CBGB's -- they remain friends. That friendship becomes dangerous as the summer heats up, fear of the .44-caliber killer intensifies, and the guys in the neighborhood begin making their own personal lists of suspects, including Ritchie.
For a while, the stories of Lee's two main characters are promising enough that SUMMER OF SAM keeps you watching. Vinny begins to disintegrate after a close encounter with the killer leaves him torn between a desire to reform and his inability to control his libido. Ritchie, meanwhile, uses dancing and turning tricks at a gay club to support his drug habit and budding career, his external outsider image hiding an even more outsider lifestyle. Leguizamo is particularly strong in his role (will someone _please_ put this guy's talent to good use?), but both characters work in juxtaposition to the Son of Sam -- they're anti-social people who happen to functionally anti-socials. Though the period production design comes and goes, there's still a strong sense of this particular time and place in New York. We see 1977 as a more intense period in the life of the city, when the thin connecting thread of rooting for the Yankees was always ready to snap into violence.
There are lots of big issues moving through SUMMER OF SAM, and Lee is ready to make sure we always know it. As talented a visual stylist as he can be, Spike Lee is also a film-maker who often doesn't know when to stop himself. He gets infatuated with distorted perspectives, or finds some way to cram in his favored "character moving on the camera track" shot, or edits not one but two montages to the accompaniment of songs by The Who. Lee even opens with an extended crane shot that serves as a big flashing red light that the director wants TOUCH OF EVIL/BOOGIE NIGHTS respect for his project. It's often invigorating, but it's also an attempt to cover for a story that lets some sub-plots drag on forever (Vinny and Dionna's ho-hum marital woes) while letting others disappear just when they seem interesting (Anthony LaPaglia as a detective with mob ties in his background). Lee may be talented, but his pure id approach to directing leads to some baffling decisions.
No decision in SUMMER OF SAM is more baffling -- or more harmful to the film -- than Lee's portrayal of Berkowitz himself. It was a risky enough maneuver introducing Berkowitz as a character at all rather than leaving him as a bogeyman haunting the periphery of the film; it was even riskier to show him freaking out in his apartment. But Lee goes past the point of no return when he actually shows a big black dog telling Berkowitz to kill in John Turturro's voice, lips moving like he was a refugee from BABE. That scene turns a killer's demented rampage into absurdist comedy, making you wonder what the hell Lee was thinking. Clearly he had ideas spilling out of himself as he prepared for SUMMER OF SAM, a million different stories he wanted to tell in this one story about the naked city. At times it gels into a gripping film. At other times, you can see Lee working...and you can see him working far too hard.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Sam son nights: 6.
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