DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1989) ***
Spike Lee made an incredible movie here, but it's also one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences I've ever had--and that includes the episode of "Golden Girls" where Estelle Getty gets a pap smear. DO THE RIGHT THING is a shocking commentary on race relations, a movie you can't watch without a strong opinion on one side or the other. Luckily, Spike didn't take sides in his presentation of the story, even if all the characters are stereotyped. The blacks are angry troublemakes who hate people of every other race and use the f-word in every sentence. The whites are angry troublemakers who hate people of every other race and use the f-word in every sentence. The Hispanics... You get the picture, I'm sure.
Lee assumes that beneath a thin veneer of courtesy, every American harbors hate for other races that will break out with the slightest provocation. Black characters make fun of the way Orientals talk but are made fun of by whites for their addiction to the word "motherf---er" and the substitution of the word "fiddy" for its more Caucasian counterpart "fifty." The cops in the movie are hateful bastards who use unnecessary brutality, taking the Rodney King treatment to its worst extreme right in front of the neighborhood blacks.
There are only a few well-thought-out characters in the movie, like Danny Aiello, an Italian who owns a pizza parlor that was there before the neighborhood was colorized. Now he's one of two non-black families in the neighborhood, but unlike the Korean convenience store owner across the street, is accepted by everyone. Spike Lee, one of the other decent characters, is his delivery boy, who manages to remain friends with his people and Aiello's.
The movie takes awhile to reach its shocking climax. The first hour moves at a leisurely pace, focusing on a day in the life of the Brooklyn neighborhood, the hottest day of the year in fact. During that time we meet the neighborhood's residents--Aiello and his two sons, one racist and one non (luckily, the pizza parlor has seating for both types), Lee and his siblings, Lee's hyper Hispanic girlfriend (played by--take a wild guess--Rosie Perez), the racist black who organizes a protest of Aiello's pizza parlor because the people on his "Wall of Fame" are exclusively Italian guys, no blacks in the lot, the big guy who walks around with a tacky boombox, three old guys who sit outside and gossip the day away, another old guy who drinks the day away and a retarded guy who bugs Lee by trying to sell them pictures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. (Lee would be so inspired by the picture he bought that he would go on to make a really long movie about it.)
Most of the characters are interesting but, for one reason or another, seemed abrasive and obnoxious to me. They're the kind of people you want to slap some sense into... and considering the movie's outcome, they'd take well to violence. If you've seen the movie, you realize the irony of the title, because hardly any of the characters ever say or do the right thing and are too one-note to sympathize with. The only exceptions are Lee, Aiello and the old drunk.
The climax almost arises out of nowhere. You can tell while watching the movie that the racial tension, personified well by the depictions of intense heat (although I could have done without the scene where Spike rubs an ice cube on Rosie's nipples), would result in some manifestation of violence. Still, once it finally happens, you wish it didn't. You wish you could sit the characters down and tell them they don't have to act like idiots, always saying and doing the wrong thing. There's another way to deal with life's problems, through intelligence and negotiation. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is doing the right thing.
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