Photograph by Parrish Lewis via Amazon Studios/Roadside Attractions
It’s a monstrous commonplace that guns are as American as apple pie, but that’s why a movie about guns, the agony of gun violence, and the crying need to control and renounce guns has to be a big, philosophical, wide-ranging film—a movie that feels as raucous and mighty and capacious and vigorous and ornery and moral and immoral and wild as the country itself. Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” set in a few neighborhoods in Chicago, is an American movie and a movie about America. It’s radically patriotic in its demand for American practice to live up to American principles, American realities to live up to American dreams, and American residents to take up the challenge of distinctively American virtues. And it’s radically angry about grievous and hypocritical, callous and cruel and racist departures from American promise, as well as radically mournful of the lives lost to gun violence and to gang violence.
“Chi-Raq” is a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” from 411 B.C., about a group of women who withhold sex from men in order to get them to end the ruinous Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes’ play is gleefully erotic—or riotously obscene—and so is “Chi-Raq”; “Lysistrata” is hectic and veers toward the ridiculous, and so does “Chi-Raq.” Lee’s audacity is as unbridled as his vision. In depicting grave subjects with comic artifice, Lee makes “Chi-Raq”this year’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”—a work of such freedom and fury that it runs the risk of moralizing misinterpretation.
In this adaptation, written by Lee and Kevin Willmott, the antics and the artifices of “Lysistrata” are thrust to the foreground. The text is written in pugnacious, witty, and whimsical rhyming verse, which the cast performs with a lyrical vigor that doesn’t jingle or trot but flows with the mighty current of heightened, emblematic speech. “Chi-Raq” is hilarious but not exactly funny—not because the jokes fall flat or the humor is off-key, but because the point is to mock the stepwise reasoning and the workaday earnestness that takes in stride a deadly emergency that, in its enormity and apparent insolubility, is nonetheless almost too absurd to be believed.
In building a movie about contemporary Chicago on ancient Greek foundations, Lee also builds on the mighty founding principles of political and philosophical thought. Far from mocking the subject or approaching it lightly, Lee takes on gun violence with a scathing seriousness that spares nobody—not the characters in the film and not its viewers. Just as Scorsese did, Lee turns his fierce gaze back at the members of the audience. Here, he forces us to consider the grim and gory pleasures that have, in the past, led us into those very seats to watch movies in which the violence that “Chi-Raq” decries is the very source of entertainment.
In the beginning is the word—a song performed by Nick Cannon (who’s also one of the movie’s stars) about gun violence in Chicago that plays on the soundtrack, accompanied by a black screen on which his lyrics pop up, and a sermon on the same subject by Father Michael Pfleger, the real-life priest who’s the basis for the character of Father Mike Corridan, played with passionate commitment by John Cusack.
Together, the song and the sermon, heard when no image is seen, are a gauntlet that Lee throws down to himself: What can popular art be in a time of crisis? How can a work of mass entertainment live up to the moral challenge that the priest poses? How can art depict and respond to the crisis, reflect the monstrous societal forces that render many black lives unlivable or simply unlived, and yet be—as art—free, personal, intimate, and beautiful?
Amazingly, Lee creates such a work of art, not by tamping down his style, suppressing his personal impulses, or subordinating his intuitions to principles, but by heightening and extending his style. He renders it inseparable from the ideas that he offers and the ideals he exalts—and fuses those analyses with a fierce, tender, overwhelming emotional power. With the burden of incommensurable pain that suffuses the movie from start to finish—a burden that the movie helps to bear with its own flamboyant fury—Lee has created a raucously joyful yet howlingly haunted jazz requiem for a ravaged city and a ravaged generation.
The title of the movie is also the nickname of one of its main characters, played by Cannon. Chi-Raq is the leader of the purple-clad Spartan gang, as well as a local hip-hop artist with big-time aspirations, and that combination of interests and talents is one of the movie’s big subjects: the connection between popular culture, including black youth culture, and gang violence. In its first dramatic scene, Chi-Raq is performing onstage at a night club—rapping with bravado about his own gunmanship and readiness to shoot down his rivals—when a gunman from the rival gang, the Trojans (whose color is orange), tries to shoot him but strikes another member of the group.
At home, he finds his girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), who’s put off by his flaunting of firearms in the bedroom. He puts them aside (with some sexual references to another weapon that he intends to use) but his house is targeted once again by the Trojans. Encouraged by a neighbor—the intellectual Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), a bereaved mother whose young daughter was killed by a stray bullet decades ago—to take action to stop the violence, Lysistrata, inspired by an online video of the Liberian activistLeymah Gbowee, approaches other Spartan women, and then Trojan women as well, to organize a sex strike in order to force the young black men of Chicago to renounce their guns. The movie isn’t about guns; it’s about masculinity and manhood, and the need to break the pathological cycle of self-identifying virility and violence.
The control that Lee imagines isn’t so much gun control as it is self-control. “Chi-Raq” is a vision of political change (about which the movie is amazingly specific) but, first, foremost, and from beginning to end, it’s about personal change—about giving up guns, and, for that matter, giving up much more. Some skeptical critics have doubted that a sex strike would, in fact, be effective in forcing violent men to surrender their firearms—as if Lee were issuing a handbook rather than making a movie. I’ll avoid spoilers here, but suffice it to say that, in the very terms of the movie, the sex strike doesn’t actually “work”—it doesn’t, in itself, induce the men in the movie’s gangs to give up their weaponry. It takes more—much more—both at a personal and a society-wide level, for them to do so.
At a personal level, it takes pain—the experience of pain, the confrontation with pain, the contemplation of pain, the testimony of pain—and Lee dramatizes pain as a matter of overwhelming public spectacle and intimate anguish. The public side emerges in the story of a seven-year-old girl named Patti who is gunned down in the street; her mother (Jennifer Hudson) expresses unspeakable grief with heartrending precision (exactly the grief that, with time, Miss Helen has given form and structure with thought and study). Patti’s funeral, held in St. Sabina Church, is an artistic spectacle of music and dance, but, above all, it’s the spark for a vast political vision, by means of Father Mike’s sermon.
That sermon is a brilliant set piece in which the priest (played by Cusack like a man possessed by the holy spirit) reproduces Pentecostal cadences in a fierce, incisive tirade that sets out the historical and political back story to the violence. He preaches about the gun trade’s connection with the “underground economy” that emerges when blacks don’t get enough of a chance in the aboveground one, and the high unemployment and discriminatory banking policies that keep the community both poor and desperate. Father Mike doesn’t shrink from citing exactly the sort of popular exaltation of gun violence, the mythologizing of the gangster life, that black artists such as Chi-Raq create and that whites living far from its realities enjoy.
Lee doesn’t leave out lives lost to police violence (there’s a superb moment in which Dolemedes shows blacks caught between gangs and the police), because the very subject of his film is larger than the immediate problem of street shootings. It’s about justice itself, and the very nature of an American society in which the complex of evils and injustices that manifests itself in terms of gang violence might be resolved. It’s a tall order—and one that Lee and Willmott fulfill boldly and brilliantly. They do so with a vast range of emotions, from frantic comedy to righteous fury, that is constantly underpinned, as if by the deep pedal point of an organ, with a weary and bottomless mourning perched on the edge of tears.
