Sundance 2012: Red Hook Summer - review

 

Spike Lee's latest is an eccentric curate's egg that shows this increasingly erratic director can still ace almost as often as he fails

A noisy, gaudy scrapbook ... a still from Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer Photograph: Sundance film festival
A two star review usually denotes a film that fails rather than appals, perhaps in performance, writing or direction, but rarely all three. But the five-star rating system just doesn't seem to apply to the latest joint from America's highest-profile African American director. It is so wilfully off the scale that it is hard to know quite how to quantify it. For start it is so very long – a whopping 130 minutes, much of that taken up with scenes that beg for the slice of some sensible scissors. For another thing, it is loud. Actors shriek to be heard above the incessant piano score, and when Bruce Hornsby isn't tinkling the ivories, any brief moment of respite is sure to be filled with a tsunami of gospel, or Judith Hill's Michael Jackson-like wall of soul.

Red Hook Summer
Production year: 2012
Directors: Spike Lee
Cast: Clarke Peters, Spike Lee
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And yet despite its knowing unruliness – self-indulgence isn't exactly a subtext here – there is a tipping point some 100 minutes in. It would be unfair to ruin the surprise, except it seems very fair to reveal that there is a surprise, since nothing in this gaudy, noisy scrapbook of a movie suggests that anything of any magnitude is coming. And yet it does. And when it does, it's a stark reminder of how good Spike Lee can be when he's on form, in films like Inside Man, The 25th Hour, Clockers, Malcolm X and, his defining work Do The Right Thing. The latter is a key reference here, with Lee on hand as that film's pizza boy, Mookie, still at Sal's after 20 years. Yet the mood is closer to one of Lee's always badly received comedies, like Crooklyn, School Daze and – shudder – She Hate Me.

It begins with a young middle-class Atlanta boy, Flick (Brown), being dropped off at his grandfather's house by his mother to spend the summer in Brooklyn. Flick is a spoilt suburban boy who talks "white" to the other kids in the projects, notably Chazz (Tony Lysaith), who is baffled by his mohawk and iPad 2. Flick's grandfather Enoch (Clarke Peters) is a preacher from the James Brown school of subtlety, and much of the film is devoted to his impressive but somewhat irritating sermons, which intrude on the film like the return of repressed DVD extras. For the next hour and a half we see Enoch trying to educate the boy, keep him away from the gangs – led by the brutally excellent Nate Parker as Box – and the mood is one of exuberant if grating whimsy.

The bombshell, when it finally comes, seems to be cut in from another movie, but its arrival saves the film from the dreaded one-star review. In a single jaw-dropping 10 or 15 minute stretch, Peters' performance spins on a dime, and for a short time the old Spike is with is: tender, sharp, smart – but above all dramatic. This nirvana doesn't last long but it proves that Lee can do it if he tries. For the most part, though, this bloated, flapping, directionless weather balloon of a film is simply trying.

• This article was amended on 24 January when a misspelling of Inside Man was corrected.