Critics reviews

Few films since have matched its lush celebration of Black life or dared to pair such intense rapture with equally complex rage. Do the Right Thing is a fever dream of Black ire and Black nationalism.

The nerves that the movie touched are as raw as ever.

The first time I saw Do the Right Thing, when it was over, I didn’t speak for a while. I was just trying to take it all in. It was a knockout – almost like being in a boxing ring. Sometimes it was brutal, and sometimes beautiful; an attack, done with style, anger and compassion.

Although it seems almost flip and far too broad to say that Spike Lee’s fiery furnace of a masterpiece is, at heart, a disquisition on humanity—in all its variety and perversity; with its precarious, usually doomed, but always moving attempts at balance—here we have it, at the outset, and in everything that follows.

Anchored on a history of racial strife that far transcends the late-80s Brooklyn block it’s set in, Do the Right Thing thrives on Lee’s ability to grind antithetical characters onto a magnetic field that concurrently pushes and pulls them apart.

I saw it in a movie theatre when it first came out, with a mostly-African-American audience, on the weekend it opened, and it is, to date, one of the most exhilarating experiences I have ever had seeing a movie out in public. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. And thinking about the reaction of that crowd.

Though audiences had to wait 23 years for the postscript, Mookie reappears in Red Hook Summer(Spike Lee, 2012), still delivering pizza with Sal's imprimatur on his shirt. Between these bookends, we might pause to note Lee's laudable resistance to premature closure, a resistance that enables audiences to ponder Sal and Mookie's complexities, and mourn Raheem's death.

While the movie is extremely political, it is also, fortunately, no didactic civics lesson: Lee is able to inspire debate about hot-button issues without pushing an agenda or providing any easy answers... It is also much to Lee's credit that, as provocative and disturbing as the film at times may be, it is also full of great humor and warmth, qualities perfectly brought out by the ebullient cast and the exuberant color cinematography of Ernest Dickerson.

When I think of this movie or re-watch this movie, I remember Pauline Kael's line about "Citizen Kane: "It's more fun than any great movie I can think of." "Do the Right Thing" is harrowing, sad, painful and often hard to watch, and its final act is tragic, and yet the word "fun" definitely applies to it. The movie is not "fun" as in light or trivial, but "fun" as in "exciting" or "stimulating."

Chief among the film's beauties is the simplicity of the setting itself: one block in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on an extremely hot summer day. With its large cast of vividly colorful characters, Do the Right Thing conjures up an environment with all the near-mythical weight of, say, Grover's Corners, the small-town American neighborhood of Thornton Wilder'sOur Town.

With its thrillingly unorthodox blend of Aristotelian unity and Brechtian artificiality, it locates the big in the small, and the national in the local. Over 120 swift minutes, it assails the viewer with a mixture of character drama, comedy, poetry, music, and then, in its riot finale precipitated by the cops' murder of young Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), dares to echo SNCC member H. Rap Brown's darkly diagnostic pronouncement in the 1960s that "violence is as American as cherry pie."

The movie was analyzed nearly to death, but hardly anybody mentioned how genuinely _bizarre_ it was, how little it resembled almost anything else in theaters back then—or today, for that matter. Lee took a scenario that seems to cry out for gritty handheld realism and directed it with the aggressive abstraction of a Broadway musical, and he stuck with that approach even at the film's explosive climax.