Movie Review – Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing (1989)
Written and directed by Spike Lee

Every ten years since 1952, the British film magazine Sight & Sound has conducted a poll among invited critics and directors to determine an ever-shifting list of the 250 greatest films of all time. The most recent list of poll results was released last year, with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman) topping the list. I decided to pick a few films near the top that I have not seen or have only seen pieces of to further my cinematic education.

I’d seen fragments of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing over the last twenty years, but never from start to finish. I can’t say I’m a massive fan of Lee’s work. I have seen six of the thirty-five films he’s made since 1983. I need to watch Malcolm X, as out of all of Lee’s work, that film intrigues me the most. A movie like his remake of Oldboy is an example of something I am perfectly fine skipping, as it was unnecessary to make and clearly not a personal project. While I haven’t seen the film Jungle Fever, I have seen that ending out of context, and wow, that does not make me want to watch it…well, possibly out of morbid curiosity. All this to say, I understand why Lee is considered a principal American director, yet I haven’t been hooked by anything I’ve seen so far.

Do the Right Thing is a fantastic film and an excellent example of how even when a filmmaker makes something personal, speaking to their experiences, they are also engaged in a vibrant dialogue with cinema across the ages. This can be seen in Radio Raheem’s speech about his brass knuckles. You can experience the film on the level of Raheem delivering this speech, and it works. If, like Lee, you have a deep knowledge of film, then you know he pulled this from Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, probably the greatest one-hit wonder film ever made. By recontextualizing that speech, delivered by Robert Mitchum’s villainous preacher, it takes the exact words and brings new meaning to them. 

Academic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote a lot about “signifyin’,” which is the wordplay often employed by Black Americans. One example is “yo mama” jokes, which might sound like brutal insults to someone outside the community but are, in actuality, a means of bonding through humor. Signifyin’ is a highly complex linguistic concept that embeds irony, metaphor, hyperbole, and other literary tropes. One purpose was to speak openly & also in secret if you were in front of white folks, while also providing a powerfully fun means of playing with language. Despite the ignorant beliefs of white people, Black Americans have had a rich & complex relationship with the English language since they initially learned it. Seeing Lee reference that Night of the Hunter speech was a delight because he made that connection across time & space with this film.

Set on a particular scorching summer day in Bedford–Stuyvesant, the film follows Mookie (Lee), a twenty-five-year-old pizza delivery man. He works for Sal (Danny Aiello), an Italian-American man from another neighborhood who has been running this pizzeria for decades with plans to leave it to his sons when he retires. His eldest son, Pino (John Turturro), is very racist and wants to move the restaurant to a white neighborhood. Younger son Vito (Richard Edson) is close friends with Mookie and doesn’t have the same feelings. 

The film floats around the neighborhood, introducing its diverse and fascinating residents. Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) is an alcoholic who does odd jobs for a few bucks here & there to buy beer from the Korean-owned grocery across the street. Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) watches the neighborhood from the window of her brownstone and is often disappointed with where she sees things going. Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith) is a mentally disabled man who sells hand-colored pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Those are just a few of the many characters we meet and whose lives come to a dramatic conclusion in the final act.

There’s an inclination, particularly by white people, to focus on Sal. The film’s action revolves around his pizzeria, so in a way that makes sense. However, that’s the way systemic racism operates. Sal’s concerns as a business owner are put before those born and raised in this neighborhood. He likes to position himself as one of the neighborhood’s institutions, talking about feeding the people since they were little kids and fashioning himself as someone beloved by them. That’s literally the same excuses a plantation owner would give to justify what he does. “Where would they be without me?” he asks. “I filled their bellies.” Well, not for free.

The crux of the movie’s conflict occurs when Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) confronts Sal about the absence of Black faces on the celebrity photos hanging from the pizzeria walls. Sal insists they are all Italian-Americans, and this is an Italian-American pizzeria. Where did all that love for the neighborhood slip away to? It’s easy to pin down Pino as a racist because he is direct about it. He doesn’t like Black people, and he says as much. Sal is the insidious face of racism, the one that tries to act like he’s a friend of Black people, all while denying them even the dignity of being acknowledged. 

The character the audience is meant to center on is Mookie. He is in the middle of this conflict. He’s been a resident of the neighborhood since he was a kid. Yet, he is also dependent on Sal for income. The escalating dispute between Sal and the neighborhood always has Mookie in the center. Mookie gets a possible vision of his future in Da Mayor, a man born here and will never leave a well-meaning, warm-hearted, but ultimately feckless figure. Da Mayor steps in just as things spiral out of control to try and “speak sense to the young people.” He fails. We’re meant to love Da Mayor but also see his “why can’t we all just get along attitude” as an oversimplification of Sal’s presence in this neighborhood.

There’s a brief moment that I think informs us why the Black residents of this neighborhood are getting more nervous. A gentrifier, played by John Savage (The Deer Hunter), goes to enter a brownstone he’s purchased and is renovating. Some of the neighbors confront him about this, and with all his white privilege, he basically tells them they don’t have the resources he does to stop him. Look at New York City or any other popular urban center these days. When white people with money decide it’s desirable to live, the current residents often have no recourse, and it becomes a game of economic chicken.

I worked at a school adjacent to public housing in downtown Nashville for several years. This was a place that had been allowed to decay by city & state leaders because the people who lived there were deemed to have little value to them. One of the worst things done to the residents of these homes was that a large wall was constructed that blocked the view from downtown of this community. Various infrastructural reasons were given, all to try and make it sound like it was in the resident’s best interests.

I also noted the proliferation of liquor and gun stores alongside grocery stores, clothing outlets, etc., on the main road adjacent to these homes. This was no accident of city planning; this was intentionally done to make life as miserable as possible for these Black people so they would leave. Then the city could come in, bulldoze it all, and make lovely little condos for vapid, wealthy white people. I know this because Nashville had already done it to another neighborhood across town. This is not reading racism into something; it’s exposing the inherent racism built into the system. 

The residents’ responses in Do the Right Thing’s neighborhood reflect what I saw from the residents of that community. Older people, worn down by a life of oppression and simply wanting peace in their final years, often pushed for compromise and an absence of conflict. Some younger people followed in their elders’ footsteps and thought that something could be achieved by reaching for a high standard set by white people. Others took a more socialist-libertarian approach and decided that if the system didn’t help them, they would help their community themselves. Even more became detached and apathetic, caught up in personal grievance and capitalist consumption culture as a means to self-medicate the pain inflicted on them. All of these responses of the social “immune system” made perfect sense, just as in this film, everyone’s reactions to Sal make sense whether you personally agree with them or not.

Spike Lee has not made a movie about “important social issues”; instead, he made a movie about what he saw in the communities he grew up in. He wanted to capture the faces & souls of the fascinating people who lived in these neglected places. Lee is akin to Martin Scorsese in that both are masters at capturing the voices of people they grew up around. It’s why both directors’ best works are the most intimate and personal ones. 

My most significant criticism of Lee about this movie is casting himself as Mookie. For all the cinematic mastery he showcases in how the film is made & told, Lee cannot act to save his life. It wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t cast some of the best actors of his generation and the one before. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee are conducting a workshop on the best of Black theater. Samuel L. Jackson, as the DJ/God, is beginning the formation of his iconic film persona. Giancarlo Esposito is already fantastic and hypnotic. Roger Guenveur Smith as Smiley was fascinating because I remembered him from a criminally overlooked one-man show, A Huey P. Newton Story, which I saw the filmed version of back in college. Aiello and Turturro are excellent, which doesn’t surprise anyone who has seen more of their work. Yet, at the center of this is Spike Lee, who looks like he attended the M. Night Shyamalan School of Directors Acting in Their Own Movies. I’ve never seen any other films where he directs and stars, but I would like to know if he improves as time passes.

Despite that one weak spot, Do the Right Thing is an American cinematic masterwork up there with The Godfather or Taxi Driver. Just as those movies did, it captures a particular moment in the American psyche and the personal perspective of the filmmakers behind the work. The choice of such bright, bold colors is a striking detail that reminds us of the exuberant life in these oft-ignored corners of humanity. No matter how much or little screen time they get, each character showcases a wealth of detail that makes us feel that they live and breathe outside the boundaries of the movie’s runtime. Buggin’ Out is as real to me as anyone I know. The same goes for Da Mayor, Radio Raheem, all of them. That’s the most important hallmark of a great film: it is alive beyond the few hours we sit watching it.