Hot time, summer in the city
Summer Of Sam A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1999 By Michael Redman
***1/2 (Out of ****)
Summer is a magical time. Young children run themselves until exhausted every day. School kids, free of the tyranny of schedules, discover what they really want to do. Even responsible adults traditionally take time off the workaday grind to kick back and have a real life.
In the best of all possible worlds, the season is a time of possibilities. Hours reading a novel on the front porch swing seem well-spent. Days in the woods away from the constant electronic hum of civilization are invigorating. The opposite sexes in their abbreviated warm weather wardrobe are so...err, fetching.
And like almost everything, summer has its darker side. The sweltering heat and humidity can be oppressive. On a bad day, everything feels dirty and grimy. Tempers flare.
In 1977, New York city is having a summer of all bad days. The temperatures are unbearable. A power blackout results in massive looting. The Son of Sam is murdering innocent lovers and has the city frozen in fear.
For a group of Italian-Americans in the Bronx, it's a time of change. Ritchie (Adrien Brody) returns to the neighborhood after a few months living uptown with spiked hair and a bad British accent. Hairdresser Vinny (John Leguizamo) struggles with his desire to be faithful to his wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino), but repeatedly fails.
As the summer wears on and the murders mount up, paranoia takes center stage. Women are wearing blonde wigs to throw the killer off track and everyone looks at their neighbors with suspicion.
The guys start drawing up a list of possible suspects. The priest down the street is a little odd. Even Reggie Jackson almost makes the list. And Ritchie? Well, Ritchie's been acting strange since he came back and no normal person would have hair like that.
Director Spike Lee has a talent for presenting his characters as sympathetic even with their flaws. Vinny wants to be a good husband, but has bought into the "whore or Madonna" view of women. He hungers for adventurous sex but can't bring himself to approach his wife with the idea so he turns to extramarital affairs. Dionna believes it is her fault he isn't interested in her. (In the nineties she would have recognized that as co-dependency, the fashionable psychological defect of the decade.)
Ritchie just wants to play rock and roll, but to buy a guitar he works as a male prostitute. He looks like a dangerous tough guy, but underneath there's a gentle side. When he falls in with local "bad girl" Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), there's genuine affection. During their first time together, she starts to perform a particularly intimate act on him and he tells her it's not necessary - they can just spend time together.
At the core of the film is the relationship between Ritchie and Vinny. Friends since childhood, their camaraderie takes some twists and turns during the long hot summer, culminating in a Biblical allegory.
Lee has some touches of genius. During the beating of an innocent victim, the participants discover their error and slowly drift away mostly wordless. It seems so _real_. His use of varied film stock works to pull us right in. He has the seventies down, from discos to Plato's Retreat.
But he falters occasionally. Other than the main four, the characters aren't very well developed and sometimes slip into cliche. When Lee appears in a bit part as a television reporter, we are pulled out of the film as we recognize him.
The director's biggest risk is showing David Berkowitz (Son of Sam). Although those scenes are effective in themselves, the film would have worked better if we had seen only the results of his actions, not him.
There's something undeniably authentic about this film and, considering the events of the past weeks, hits a little too close to home for comfort.
(Michael Redman has written this column for over 23 years and would like to commend the family of Won-Joon Yoon and the Korean Methodist Church for a subtle yet courageous demonstration of the unity of all people in their full-page thank-you announcement in the "Herald Times". The message closed with a quote from Starhawk, a practicing Wiccan.)
[This appeared in the 7/15/99 "Bloomington Independent", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at Redman@indepen.com] -- mailto:redman@indepen.com This week's film review: http://www.indepen.com/ Film reviews archive: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman Y2K articles: http://www.indepen.com/
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