Crooklyn
First screened in February 2016 / Most recently screened and reviewed in February 2022
Director: Spike Lee. Cast: Zelda Harris, Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Carlton Williams, Sharif Rashed, Tse-Mach Washington, Christopher Knowings, Isaiah Washington, Spike Lee, David Patrick Kelly, José Zúñiga, Frances Foster, Norman Matlock, Patriece Nelson, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Joie Lee, Bokeem Woodbine, RuPaul. Screenplay: Joie Lee and Spike Lee. VOR:⑤
I wish it were more often on people's lips when we spoke of Lee. But he swings with equal muscle and exuberance. Made its mark on filmmakers.
This is Spike Lee's tree that grows in you-know-where. It's also his Meet Me in St. Louis, virtually sung-through by the royal parade of its superabundant, 70s-sourced song score, all harmonizing with the rich, emotionally sonorous performances of adults and children alike. The bright, colorful frames of Crooklyn would make the Freed Unit proud. Rather than the bold, sweaty color-blocking of Do the Right Thing's monolithic reds, yellows, and blues, almost every frame of Crooklyn swirls with entire wheels of pigment and paint—and the frames themselves entail, I think, Spike Lee's greatest experiment in the controlled chaos of movement. Restless tykes and feuding siblings and bumptious neighbors and hip-swinging passersby and blonde bodega Medusas and televised Soul Train dancers promenade in and out of all four sides of any given shot. Anything could happen in any direction. Anything in this life could speed up, slow down, or pop off at any point. Things are always on the verge of going south, geographically and otherwise. Resilience usually wins the day, but not every day.
Did Joie Lee have more scripts like this percolating in her mind, or do the inordinate tenderness, exuberance, and Nashville-like breadth of this one suggest it was The One she was born to write? Could her brother Spike have developed a longer creative partnership with the legendary d.p. Arthur Jafa, who attains comparable heights here as he did on Daughters of the Dust, even as those peaks look as different as McKinley and Machu Picchu? Maybe, but Jafa is a long, rare story of his own. What matters is the kinetic, polychromatic wonder the two of them achieved here.
Could I love the performances of Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo more, individually in their unmatched but creatively reimagined charisma or together in their deeply plausible, loving but faltering but sustaining marriage? Reader, I could not love either of them more. I thought briefly about how I might try, and my medulla rebelled, and my cerebellum China syndromed.
People often treat Crooklyn like a second-stringer in Lee's career, but if I could keep just one of the movies he made in my 70s-denim pocket, this one makes a strong, singing, swinging case. Grade:A–
