Delroy Lindo, for those familiar with the actor’s work, has a rich history of playing complicated father figures so authentically that by now his presence alone conjures shades of a distinctively Lindo-ian patriarch: poised, regal, all at once warm and vaguely foreboding, possessed of a thinly veiled electricity waiting to be triggered. In the nineties, Spike Lee frequently harnessed the actor’s extraordinary multivalence, first in Malcolm X (1992) as young Malcolm’s crime boss mentor, then Crooklyn (1994) where he played a jazz musician (not unlike Lee’s own father) struggling to keep his family afloat, and finally a drug lord in Clockers (1995). It is fitting that they should reunite in Da 5 Bloods in particular. This new film, released last weekend on Netflix in lieu of a theatrical release following planned-for Cannes premiere,resists easy classification, in part because—as Lee joints tend to be these days—it is thematically overstuffed and prone to didactic tangents. But for all its excess, the director firmly locates the soul of his film in fractured filial relationships, biological or otherwise, which is to say he locates the film in Lindo, wielding the full breadth of his long untapped voltage.
The film follows an aging (and hilarious) crew of Black Vietnam veterans: Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Paul (Lindo), “Da Bloods.” They have returned to Ho Chi Minh City all these years later to recover the buried remains of their friend, fallen brother-father figure “Stormin” Norman (Chadwick Boseman). They have also come for gold, blocks of it, originally intended for indigenous Vietnamese allies before the Bloods discovered it in a downed U. S. plane. Paul’s bleeding-heart son David (Jonathan Majors) joins them, concerned for his father, who is easily the most transparently haunted of the vets. The war has stolen from them all in one way or another; this gold is the reparations they will otherwise never reap. However, Paul emerges a uniquely tragic figure. To his old friends’ growing horror, the Trump-voting, MAGA-hat wearing septuagenarian—who recoils at the sight of Vietnamese people—has turned bitter and alarmingly mercurial, transformed by grief and rage. If a xenophobic Black conservativeseems to some improbable, he is precisely what a nation built upon plunder and lies might wrought: a man for whom war and conquest is the most American thing of all.
War never really ends, characters keep reminding us, and sure enough war resurfaces on their mission: prisoners are taken, skirmishes follow, international alliances formed. War dramas (really just a western—a tale of cowboys and Indians—by another name) and heist adventures are essentially cinematic, and to merge the two understands that treasure hunts have more to do with the realities of war than American cinema has traditionally let on. Lee renews the classic furniture of these genres by accessing instead the complex demons of Black soldiers, forced to be agents of a ravenous empire that threatened to consume them, too.
But it has been a long time since the director trusted his audiences, perhaps because he is now a much more mainstream filmmaker, in name if not always in practice. He refuses to allow the inherent eloquence of his narrative to go unspoken, so inevitably characters end up announcing his broader intentions. More than one character notes how “uninformed” Americans are, and the Bloods openly discuss the way American cinema revises and obfuscates history (e.g. Rambo). “All them Holly-weird motherfuckers trying to go back and win the Vietnam war,” Eddie laughs as they stroll down a Saigon street backlit by McDonalds.
Lee confronts mythmaking and American imperialism more cogently in the fabric of Da 5 Bloods, where bouncing between formats—mainly 16mm film stock and digital—as well as aspect ratios he can negotiate the very boundaries of cinema, how it can empower and how often it deceives. Grainy flashbacks to a heroic, gun-toting (and ultimately Christ-like) Norman, accented by a wryly grandiose theme from Lee’s longtime composer Terrence Blanchard, echo the (problematic) valor of the Old Hollywood war film. In fact, the director is particularly well-suited for exploring the architecture of mythos, given his proclivity for folding nonfiction into his films. In a characteristically unflinching opening sequence (Malcolm X opens with the beating of Rodney King and Clockers with the photographs of young Black victims of gun murders) archival footage and newsreels contextualize a tale of unending state-sanctioned violence waged brutally on home soil and abroad. The execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém during the Tet Offensive lands an especially lasting gut-punch.
Besides the intergenerational tension between characters, the film itself is locked in an ancestral dance with the most quintessential American text on the subject, Apocalypse Now (1978), a specious extension of an imperialist project that reduces the Vietnamese in their own history to make room for white American moral quandaries, acted out upon their maimed bodies and exoticized land. For his part, Lee is more attentive to what the Vietnamese lost in the war, but supporting characters—tour-guide-turned-ally Vinh (Johnny Trí Nguyễn) and Otis’s former lover Tiên (Lê Y Lan)—certainly could have used more dimensionality. One of the most recognizable tunes in cinema, Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” bridges the helicopter assault on a village in Apocalypse Now to its famous forebear D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Lee recycles it, and with it all that history, for a scene where Black veterans chart a course back to the site of their trauma—in search of restitution—on a slow-drifting tourist boat. But what Paul really wants, no amount of money will ever satisfy.
It’s the core performances that truly give the film its wings. The Wire alums Peters and Whitlock have long deserved the kind of roles they clearly relish here. But Lindo does especially formidable work, frenetic, layered, and dynamic, as a man so ravaged by grief that it has robbed him, grimly, of his relationship with his son, the most precious thing he had left. Da 5 Bloods sometimes flounders under Lee’s classically heavy hand, but without a doubt it belongs among the most vigorous of his corpus. And through Lindo, the film stages its most effective argument about plunder and theft, what can be restored and what is forever lost.
