Bamboozled (2000)

There are so many things I don't like about Spike Lee's movies. It's not just that he hates white people. He doesn't like black people much either. Spike is always angry, and he always has an ax to grind. He has no talent at all for creating lifelike characters or showing lifelike emotions on the screen. He's incapable of subtlety, nuance, irony, or perspective. The tone is always shrill, accusatory, hysterical, or self-pitying. His characters don't have feelings, they have ideas, and they only exist to make whatever point he's trying to make. Even though his clout has allowed him to work with all the brightest and most energetic actors of the last twenty-five years, I have never seen any actor, male or female, black, white or brown, give a moving performance in a Spike Lee film. It's just not possible to be natural in the artificial world of Spike Lee.Having said all that, I think BAMBOOZLED is Spike Lee's best film, better than DO THE RIGHT THING in a lot of ways. The mood is restrained, by his standards, the drama is quietly poignant instead of shrilly self-righteous, and much of the criticism of white America and the entertainment industry is movingly expressed and fairly presented. Several things work to Spike's advantage in this story of how black entertainers are forced to wear black face and inadvertently start a modern day comedy craze. Because he's exploring the entertainment world of the past, he can be honest and factual without resorting to hysterical finger pointing and conspiracy theories. He's able to show how things really were by using images white people actually created for their own entertainment. At the same time, for once Spike himself is able to see both sides of a question. Many of the old minstrel show artists were just that, brilliant artists, and this movie actually recreates their comic genius and dancing in a way that's as elegiac as it is horrifying. There's no way for Spike to resolve the contradiction between being proud of the past and being ashamed of it, and that's why Delacroix "the Negro" is unable to survive. Instead of starting a riot, he goes out quietly, bleeding to death slowly and painfully at the end of the film. But for once a Spike Lee character dies with meaning and dignity. I'm not a Spike Lee fan, by any stretch of the imagination. But this was truly his finest hour.

To give credit where it's due, Spike Lee is a genuine article, someone who came out of NYU and became one of the most recognizable personalities in film-making. His voice is his own, and whether working for a studio or on more independent terms it's always a "Joint". Is this always a marker of him hitting it out of the park every time? Not really. As if he was Jean-Luc Godard among the black filmmaker's circle, when he's on fire he's surely hot, and when he's not it's f***ing horrifying to see him fail. Bamboozled is one of those latter times, and it's so flawed in so many ways that it's a wonder that some of the good ideas come through in the mid-section. It's the kind of movie where one may like it more for what it could have been rather than what it is.Bamboozled is meant to be, as Lee's character Delacroix (Damon Wayans) points out more than once both to the audience in dictionary definition and layman's terms, a satire. Thanks for the reminder, Spike! This is all well and good, but it's ultimately misguided and without a really solid comic viewpoint. In essence what Lee is after is a premise sort of out of Mel Brooks's the Producers; a creative guy down on his luck finds something to push that he thinks is so offensive and terrible that it won't run for very long, only to find that it becomes a surprise smash hit. Where Brooks had really funny and spot-on casting with Mostel and Wilder and characters to care about in their lunacy, Lee makes it a total mish-mash that is unnerving. And for every little moment, like the "ads" for the likes of Timmy Hill(n-word), there are a lot of satirical targets that just fall flat.But back to the casting for a moment: Damon Wayans, both his performance and his character of Delacroix, is a total disaster. Maybe Wayans has done some good work in the past (ironically, as it's mentioned in the film as a point of reference for black variety shows, in In Living Color), but he makes the character sound totally off-key, sounding like a nerd with a bad accent and with mannerisms that are just awful. Whether or not the blame is Wayans or Lee's writing and direction is a 50/50 split; others like Davidson and Glover fare a little better, and Jada Pinkett Smith arguably delivers the best non-unreal performance of the lot. And Mos Def basically hadn't really become an actor quite yet, so his turn here is mostly as a spoof (a flat one at that as a gangster rapper). And don't get me started on Michael Rappaport, ugh! Bamboozled goes up and down in its level of pretentiousness and ineptitude: for the first half an hour I wondered if I was really watching a movie by Spike "Do the Right Thing" Lee, as it's mostly shot in mini-DV camera style like some amateurs from a college film program in their first year. It doesn't even FEEL like any semblance of a real movie, save for some attempts at moving the plot forward (Rappaport's insistence on getting more "edgy" black images on TV to Delacroix, who responds with his brilliant put-on), until about forty-five minutes in. Then it starts to get slightly more interesting, though still problematic in filming style and performances (albeit I did enjoy, as filmed in 16mm, the Mantan sequences as a hyper-stylized set-piece, and the one scene with Delacroix and his stand-up comic father played by Paul Mooney).But as Lee's polemic grows more dire and more serious, and as the circumstances of Womack and Manray's disagreement about what they're doing leads to a somewhat predictable, horribly melodramatic and preachy finale, I was ready to chuck my diet coke at the screen. Yet I stuck through to the end, and realized something during the final five or so minutes as the cavalcade of images in montage went by of American TV and movie history of black stereotypes (including the infamous Birth of a Nation racism); had Lee done much of what he's presented in Bamboozled as a real documentary- which is just as much if not more-so history lesson than satire- then he might be on to something with a better grip on minstrel shows and media-stereotypes. Instead, as with She Hate Me (though in a way not as entertainingly in a bad-movie sort of way), Lee vomits up all of his ideas in a spastic narrative, and only a few of them stick out. When they do stick out, it's cool to watch. When they don't, it's tiresome, scatter-shot, and ultimately very faulty in execution. 4.5/10

I enjoyed Bamboozled up until the last half hour. The murder sequences turned a smart and poignant comedy into a heavy-handed morality play. After the bloodbath, the comical voice-over narration seemed grossly inappropriate. Besides, the characters' fates were completely out-of-keeping with their roles in the movie. How come Man Ray's business partner got to live and Man Ray died? Man Ray was definitely the more sympathetic of the two. Also, it pained me to see Jada Pinkett Smith's character go from smart, successful woman to crazed, gun-wielding lunatic. I wish they could have just cut out the murder sequences and went straight to the well-conceived-and-executed ending montage.All told, Bamboozled is a good movie that, like nearly every other film made in the last 15 years, would have been better off had they cut a half hour from it's running time. What was it that Hitchcock said about how movies should be timed to the carrying capacity of the human bladder?

An obvious challenge to Spike Lee's Bamboozled starts with the opening scene of Pierre Delacroix's broad accent. Like an old VHS tape, there is something about the sound of Damon Wayans voice that hurts the ears and makes us wonder if Lee was intoxicated while Wayans was shooting his scenes. But as the film progressed, I realized the magnitude of the brutal, pompous accent. In this film, racial identity is at the forefront of its message while Lee successfully incorporates the theme of one's own identity as a human being. While we see blatant racism being practiced by our own black protagonist, we soon understand that this is all possible because he never really knows who he is as a result of society's attempt to tell him who he should be: a bumbling black man who can entertain white folk.Halfway through the film we find that Pierre is not really Pierre. His name is Peerless, the son of Junebug, a black comedian who tells his son to not sell out to Hollywood because they will change who he is in order to make money. Pierre's problem is, he has no grasp of a true identity, therefore he has had to create his own persona to please his white executives.On a more humorous note, Mos Def plays a black hip hop artist to refuses to be called by his "slave name" Julius Hopkins, and instead wants to be called Big Blak Afrika. Again the idea of black identity in a white society is explored.In the end, we realize, in some part, why there is an identity crisis among African Americans when we see the montage of racially charged cartoons, films, and TV shows which pigeon hole blacks into stereotypes. This scene more than any other scene in the film made me ashamed and saddened by America's tendency to entertain through exploitation. Lee readdresses the foundation of racism that has already been created in our society even though many have already forgotten these images.