A film that has been awaited for years, but where Spike Lee failed to meet expectations
On November 17, 1992, Spike Lee presented his sixth feature film to the world: “Malcolm X”, the first big-budget film after a series of independent successes that culminated in 1989 with “Do the Right Thing”. Three hours and twenty-two minutes of study on the political figure of Malcolm Little (1925-1965), central to the Afro-American culture of the 1960s, who had replaced the X in his surname by eliminating it by virtue of the fact that he was a legacy of slavery.
In its short and controversial existence, Malcolm X brought the theories of NOI (Nation Of Islam) to their greater visibility, a movement born in the 1930s with the aim of sensitizing the black population to re-embrace religion and primitive traditions and create a completely black and pro-Islamic parallel nation within the USA , becoming (with Martin Luther King, long considered more his rival than his partner) one of the leading exponents of the civil rights of African Americans. He had a complicated childhood and adolescence, which led him to a conviction for theft in 1946: and it was in Charlestown prison, Boston, that he intercepted the supremacist theories of the NOI and converted to Islam and then, once released from prison, in 1952, join the organization. His name finally came to the fore in 1957, when he gathered hundreds of people in front of the New York police station where the authorities denied Johnson Hinton, a member of the NOI who was beaten and arrested, was located, and managed to have the man transported, seriously wounded, in a hospital. From that moment, he became (also) an uncomfortable media phenomenon; and his radical ideas culminated in a famous speech in which he declared that black people in the United States must fight for their rights by all means necessary.
But his star shone for a while. Divided into three parts, the film accounts for all these events (taking large – and contested – liberties): from his turbulent youth to his years in prison, from his personal questioning as a public activist to his relationship with the educator Betty Shabazz, from violent split with the Nation Of Islam at his assassination (in all probability wanted and perpetrated by the former comrades themselves, with CIA support) at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965. It may seem paradoxical that, in the not remote 1992, the the difficulty of telling black stories in Hollywood was still so persistent: but “Malcolm X” remains above all, in retrospect, a film that clearly restores that state of things. In fact, the representatives of the most daring industry tried unsuccessfully for at least two decades to bring X’s autobiography released in 1965 to the screen: so much so that the producer Marvin Worth had acquired the rights to it as early as 1967, even if he was not able immediately to realize the project and as a fallback produced in 1972 the documentary by Arnold Perl (Oscar nominee) “Malcolm X: His Own Story As It Really Happened”. It was only thanks to the involvement of Spike Lee (who took over from Norman Jewison in 1990), who worked with Arnold Perl on the remnants of the old original script by writer James Baldwin, that the film finally went into production.
But Lee had a thousand problems: the private threats of the leader Louis Farrakhan, the hostility of exponents of black culture (such as the playwright Amiri Baraka, who publicly mocked him), the budget clashes with Warner (which led him to invest two of the three million dollars of his fee to finance the filming, then involving VIPs such as Prince, Janet Jackson and Oprah Winfrey for complementary injections of liquidity). And finally, the mountain gave birth to a mouse. Despite a first-rate cast, with Denzel Washington spearheading the title role (and Angela Bassett as Betty Shabazz, Al Freeman jr. as the preacher Elijah Muhammad, Lee himself as Malcolm’s childhood friend , Shorty; and a large list of supporting actors including Delroy Lindo, Giancarlo Esposito and Christopher Plummer), the style that the director wanted to adopt for the biopic was the furthest thing from his incendiary and pungent verve of the beginnings: and at the time whose river-films such as “JFK – A case still open” by Oliver Stone seemed to dictate the rules for “civilized” cinema, Lee also lets himself be carried away by grandiloquence, referring to models (such as Coppola or Scorsese; the latter not by chance nor later produced “Clockers”) that “his” audience struggled to forgive him.
This is how you frame your masterpiece missed in the contemporary (the opening sequence mounts authentic footage of the Rodney King incident and an image of the burning American flag; the closing one sees Nelson Mandela – who had just been released from prison at the time – addressing young South African students using the same words as Malcolm X); but he remained the victim, in the supporting structure, of an unexpected oleography, as well as of a verbiage capable in the long run of backfiring against any attempt to take a “lateral” position towards that culture of entertainment dominated by the gaze and hypocrisy of the “whites” ”. Ending up making what historically remains a sort of film-matrix from which a large part of today’s far more focused “black” cinema projects derive; but also an example (negative and ambiguous) of his (accidental?) inability to synthesize a form capable of neutralizing and transcending that of the “enemy”. For once, the Academy was right: and “pun” a film that was supposed to openly play against it but which then hypocritically turned out to be an “Oscar-worthy study”, with only two nominations: the one for extraordinary costumes by Ruth E. Carter and the (obvious) one for best actor to Denzel Washington (but the award was stolen from him by Al Pacino for “Scent of a Woman”).
November 17, 2022 (change November 17, 2022 | 11:42 am)
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