BAMBOOZLED (2000)
Grade: C-
Director: Spike Lee
Screenplay: Spike Lee
Starring: Damon Waynes, Jada Pinkett, Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rapaport, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Paul Mooney, Mos Def, Sarah Jones, Susan Batson,
Spike Lee's BAMBOOZLED comes packaged with several potent messages and very well may be an "important" film, but cinematically speaking, I could never recommend it. For some, the picture's all encompassing amateurishness (everything from the look to the screenplay is off) will be beside the point. Many will come out of this thing floored for Spike does, if little else, visually demonstrate the offhand racism that was so much a part of our entertainment's past. But nearly all that is done in a ten minute collection of footage that follows the film; we're treated to a montage, sort of like a demented THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT Oscar opener, in which we see various points in our American entertainment history featuring such beloved stars as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney participating in casually racist acts. It made me wish that Spike had better utilized his talents on making a documentary about the bygone popularity of minstrel acts, rather than the rancorous tract against whoever and whatever this turned out to be.
I'm not sure if Spike is yet a great film maker, though I find him to be consistently interesting and I look forward to his films in the same way I look forward to Oliver Stone's. Lee has a knack for fashioning provocative premises and directing them in a heady improvisational style, but lately his pictures seem to have gotten less mature and more frayed and undisciplined. It's not that I'm complaining about Spike's subversion of classical structure and filmic rules, I could care less, but more of the inconsistency in his characters who seem to be one thing one moment, then another the next, with no logic other than for Spike to make a point or (in most cases) give us a loud impactfull scene.
In the film, Damon Waynes plays the (purposely) pretentiously named Pierre Delacroix (called De La by his faux-friends), a lone, occasionally self-hating black producer at a low rated UPN-like TV station. His projects consistently fail commercially and even his white producer, Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), a boorish loudmouth who peppers his vernacular with various derogatory terms, tells him his shows aren't "black enough". The character is Spike's not too veiled parody of Quentin Tarantino, and one of many thin caricatures kept around to provoke more than anything. Hoping to get fired, Pierre comes up with the idea of putting on a black minstrel show complete with blackface and set on a Watermelon farm. He pitches it as a satire, enlisting the assistance of two talented homeless men to play characters on his show. They present the idea to Dunwitty, who loves it, and before long the thing is on the air playing to an initially stunned audience, then gradually taking off, setting into effect a veritable blackface craze. All of America is in black face.
Waynes is a talented comedian who, like Chris Rock, has yet to fully shine on the big screen. Here, he miscalculates with a horrible affected "buppie" accent, making him sound more like a CONEHEAD than any kind of wannabe intellectual I've ever met. The performance is wrong on several levels, as is the strikingly ill defined character. At times De La is presented as a black-a-phobic (after auditioning talent for his show he stuffily proclaims " I don't want to have anything to do with anything black for at least two weeks"), and at other times he's downright militant about his race, bellyaching about how there aren't any black writers on his show.
As satire, BAMBOOZLED fails dismally. It's one of those that mistakes cruelty for cleverness. Spike hits easy targets with easier gags, one being his references to Tommy Hillfigger, designated here as Tommy Hillnigger, apparently because the company has the temerity to market clothing to black consumers. Strangely enough, Lee doesn't attack NIKE for doing the very same thing. Other jokes are at the expense of Ving Rhames who dared give his Emmy to a white man, and some even aimed at wimpy white liberals. Of course there's nothing wrong with slyly picking apart societal tent-poles like Tommy Hillfigger, problem is Spike Lee isn't known for being sly; here, he's using a bazooka when a B-B gun would be more efficient.
Spike has clearly used the classic media satire, NETWORK, as a model. At one point one of the character's echoes Peter Finch's "I want you to go to your window" speech, and like that film, this one attempts to be bitingly humorous (with occasional somber overtones) for most of its running time, then hits us with a dramatic sucker punch. What makes BAMBOOZLED inferior to NETWORK (besides being unfunny) is that it doesn't even seem to know why it exists. What's it trying to say? Spike has stated in interviews that he sees his film as a comment on current television where blacks are mostly kept around to act as buffoons in laugh-a-minute sitcoms. He claims that there are no dramatic shows featuring predominantly black casts and that blacks are still exploited, though now less outright. Not being black, maybe I don't see the whole picture, but I believe myself to be a sensible human being (sadly, frequent readers of this site may beg to differ) and I can unequivocally say that he's wrong. Spike's film isn't at all timely because, at this point, there are several dramatic shows on TV that showcase predominately black casts, those being CITY OF ANGELS, THIRD WATCH, OZ, HOMICIDE, and GIDEON'S CROSSING, all recent TV programming. As such, maybe this sort of satire would have worked more effectively in the 70's or 80's. Now, with continually growing opportunity for black actors and film makers, it feels like an out-of-touch artist's attempt to stir up undue controversy
Though setting his race fable in the present era makes it a (wrongheaded) cautionary tale, I think Lee would have done better to explore the craze from the point of view of the 1930's when this type of thing was largely accepted. Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Godsen, who performed in blackface as the title duo on the AMOS AND ANDY show, once tremendously popular now wildly reviled, were even beloved among black communities. I bring this up because the most powerful portions of the film are steeped in the flippant racism of that era, like a clip we get of a well known actress dutifully putting on black face to "ugly up" as some sort of punishment. Those images hit nerves with far more thrust than Spike's lame diatribes on Tommy Hillfigger and Quentin Tarantino.
Lee obviously sees his character, Junebug (comedian Paul Mooney), a salty comic and none to proud father of Pierre, as the sole hero of the film. Spike allots Mooney (as Junebug) about five minutes to do his stand up routine and the guy is clearly talented, eliciting laughs from the audience on screen as well as off. Though the character is relegated to performing in broken down dives rather than within golden gates of Hollywood. The movie argues that this is the case because, as a performer, Junebug hasn't sold out. What an absurd notion that is when we clearly see that the comic isn’t doing material that's any edgier or racier than what Chris Rock does on his popular HBO show every week. Has Rock sold out? Gone Hollywood? Doubtful. It's as if Spike is desperately clinging to this illusion of oppression just to have a reason to be angry. I'm not implying that racism or prejudicial attitudes no longer exists towards blacks, but certainly no more so than towards Jews, or Asians (who can't even seem to get into movies unless they're doing kung fu; how about a movie about that).
When Spike flashes to more recent footage of black actors acting like clowns on TV shows such as THE JEFFERSONS, it's even harder to identify with his views that minstrels still exist: Jimmie Walker's goofy "Dy-no-mite" catch phrase on GOOD TIMES is no more obscene to blacks than Kramer constantly falling all over the place on SEINFELD is to Jews. Though by incorporating those images, Spike may actually get people to believe that they are racist.
Following the film I was reminded of a high school class session wherein my Social Studies teacher had all his students view a two hour video that attempted to demonstrate how music videos are subtly derogative toward women and insight males to think of them as little more than a willing place to insert their penises. Audio of a smarmy British announcer lewdly commenting on the action was played over sexy music video images. The visuals, all of scantily clad women cavorting about in various rock videos, were initially arousing. By the hour mark, the un-ceasing sexual imagery became tiresome, nearly off putting a half-hour later. Soon I, as well as most everyone else, was disgusted; a spoonful of sugar had not so quickly become one hundred of em'. In its final ten minutes the video began to juxtapose a rape scene from the film THE ACCUSED with the cavorting females in the music videos. The class was hushed. They seemed collectively awed, as was I. Though later, after letting the experience summersault in my noggin a bit, I realized how easily we had been manipulated by a piece of film that really didn't prove much of anything. Kudos to the filmmakers, I suppose. They effectively convinced the greater part of a classroom by brainwashing us with two hours of smoke and mirrors. By the end of that endless video they could have inserted footage of a BUGS BUNNY cartoon and made that seem lascivious. After trouncing through the endlessly repetitive video with the smarmy Brit subtly bashing us for daring to enjoy it, we had all been so de-sensitized to overt sexuality that its mingling with sexual violence seemed like a natural, though frightening, progression. Spike's brief inclusions of more current sitcom footage and snide disses of WB comedies feel the same. There isn't anything any more calculated about those black sitcoms than the plethora of teen soaps that marginalize the high school experience into powder puff drama.
Additional irritations: the minstrel show itself just isn’t funny enough to warrant any reaction beyond incredulousness, which is the audiences' initial reaction in the film. It could be possible that Lee is commenting on an audiences willingness to laugh at anything when they see that blinking laugh signal telling them to do so, but I doubt it. I don't think Spike ever intended to show us why the show would be funny, after all the crowd I watched the film with stared at those bits in utter silence. If Lee wants to challenge the minstrel idea he should at least make it amusing, get his audience thinking, "why am I laughing at this?" He never does this. His provocations are purely surface level; he's like a politician expelling shallow political rhetoric at his enemies instead of getting personal. The fact that his show isn’t entertaining in the least makes the reaction to it seem like a shallow plot device. In the film, Spike has the white audience members looking to the blacks for approval to laugh. When the blacks begin to chuckle the whites join in, like sheep.
Spike's usually evenhanded portrayal of Caucasians is skewed by his obvious contempt for liberal white attitudes. Lee has a scene where he chastises a Jewish Media consultant essentially for proclaiming that she's down with blacks; her parents dared march with Martin Luther King Jr. The offenses rattle on and on and on. It's Lee's approach that keeps the film from being anything more than a ferociously angry piece of celluloid. While DO THE RIGHT THING had a reason for its anger, BAMBOOZLED does what some knock-kneed politicians claimed that film did; it provokes. It pumps a load of hot air onto its audience just to make us sweat.