Don't count on it. At root, most Spike Lee movies are about racial grievance, and despite the startling absence here of black major characters, Summer of Sam is largely about racial grievance, too. Despite a couple of negligible field trips to Yankee Stadium, the lurid Manhattan club scene, and, yes, serial killer David Berkowitz's chaotic apartment, Lee's 13th feature film is set almost exclusively in an insular Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, and it is in this confined space that Lee again vents his rage against bigotry.
Blue-collar New York Italians have served as Lee's whipping boys since 1989, when a pack of white vigilantes in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, surrounded Yusuf Hawkins, an innocent black teenager who wandered into their neighborhood: One of them shot him dead. Lee's best film, the incendiary Do the Right Thing, resonated perfectly with the Hawkins case, and it launched his first crop of unlikable "guidos." But the sheer volume of lamebrained, spaghetti-bending caricatures the director stuffs into Summer of Sam is unlike anything he has conjured up before. For decades, Hollywood remained stubbornly ignorant of the varieties of black experience, and Lee seems more determined than ever to return the favor to anybody named Mario, Tony or Luigi.
Out of the primordial ooze crawls our protagonist, Vinny (John Leguizamo), a cocky little Bronx hairdresser who's cheating on his wife and who remains captive to both machismo and Catholic guilt. He's a sneery hustler in a high-boy collar, all bad attitude and neighborhood flash. There's no way that Lee, despite his halfhearted effort, can convince us he has the slightest regard for this guy. Vinny's street-corner pals are even more primitive: They include a sweaty junkie (Saverio Guerra) who hawks stolen lobsters to finance his next fix; a fat drug dealer (Michael Rispoli) who brings his little girl to work with him; and "Bobby the Fairy" (Brian Tarantino), a mincing caricature in which Lee seems to take special pleasure. When they're all standing around smoking cigarettes, Lee sticks a "Dead End" road sign into the frame with them. Just like a student moviemaker might.
The women? Ruby (Jennifer Esposito) is the neighborhood slut who's really looking for love. Gloria (Bebe Neuwirth) is the married hair-salon owner who can't wait to take her dress off for Vinny, and Helen (Patti LuPone) is a slovenly mother who runs an illegal card game. But even when he's striving to be pluralist and open-minded, Lee's contempt shows. The people the movie would have us like are also fools, sellouts or corruptibles. Vinny's pretty wife, Dionna (Mira Sorvino), is so stupidly blind to his sins that you want to shake her, and Vinny's best friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody), who has broken with the old Bronx ways by moving downtown, spiking his hair and affecting a British working-class accent, is anything but a model of social rebellion: He makes ends meet working as a gay whore and acting in porn flicks.
Meanwhile, the local Mafia goons, with Ben Gazarra's mumbling godfather in the lead chair, come straight out of Goombah Central--right down to the red-sauced noodles on their dinner plates.
The cast members have plenty of room to emote, but their task feels a bit empty and thankless. For the most part, they're carrying the director's water.
The original Summer of Sam screenplay is credited to a pair of Lee's friends, Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli. But the ethnic stereotypes that abound here have clearly been tweaked by Lee himself, who acknowledges "opening up the story" from the writers' final draft.
Superficially, that story tells how Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco), alias "the .44 caliber killer" and "Son of Sam," ignited paranoia across the entire face of the city in the heat of '77. Lee splashes screaming headlines from the New York tabloids across the screen, tells us how brunettes (Sam's victims) began dying their hair blond, and provides disconcerting glimpses of the killer's private torment. He also reenacts--with a little too much zest, I thought--four or five of the actual murders. In another questionable aesthetic choice, Lee has the black dog that Berkowitz claimed was commanding him to kill . . . actually command him to kill--in a human voice. This ploy is likely meant to chill. Instead, the audience I saw the movie with couldn't help bursting out into laughter.
In any event, Summer of Sam has very little to do with the psychological effects of a killer loose in the city. Its real subject is the violence of lynch mobs. In a far-fetched twist, Vinny's none-too-bright pals conclude that their old friend Ritchie is the Son of Sam--largely because he now sports a blond Mohawk, plays punk rock at a club on the Bowery, and hardly ever stops by anymore for a slice of pizza and a beer. In the end, the assembled morons go after Ritchie. But in Spike Lee's view, this has nothing to do with the Berkowitz case itself: If these mindless barbarians can savage one of their own, it says here, imagine what they'd do to somebody they already hate--a black or a Puerto Rican. Thus does Lee once more evoke the ghost of Yusuf Hawkins.
Where some viewers see belligerence and shaky melodrama, others are bound to find social truth. After all, Lee is a moviemaker who, in his best work, tackles tough social issues head-on--interracial romance in Jungle Fever, the burdens of greatness in Malcolm X, racism itself in Do the Right Thing. But even staunch Lee fans may find Summer of Sam disappointing. Here is America's most heralded and, possibly, most talented minority filmmaker diddling around with caricature and race-baiting when he could be aiming higher.
