Home > The new Spike Lee movie: "She Hate Me."
by ANTHONY LANE
"She Hate Me."
The new Spike Lee movie, "She Hate Me," turns out to be at least two new Spike Lee movies rolled into one. In fact, the mélange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits, and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally modelled less on the classic narratives of cinema than on, say, a portion of Russian salad. The first morsel of story, which seems chunky enough to fill an entire picture, concerns a fictitious pharmaceutical company by the name of Progeia. Its hot product is an aids vaccine, but the heat is not enough; as the movie starts, the vaccine has been denied a license by the F.D.A. A young black vice-president of the company, Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), goes to see one of its senior scientists, Dr. Herman Schiller (David Bennent), who, assailed by the news, takes violent action. Progeia has blood on its hands.
These opening scenes are much more spooky and dislocated than any later occurrence. Lee is not at home in the corporate world, and he wishes the same unease upon his characters. Jack either drifts or hastens along the gray, metallic cool of the corridors, but never seems to settle; Margo Chadwick (Ellen Barkin), a senior executive, curses with such bounty and bile that you instantly sense a half-buried anger at herself; the C.E.O. is played by Woody Harrelson, who, while wishing to appear strong and sculpted, looks not as if he has climbed the corporate ladder but, being Woody Harrelson, as if he had been recently lowered from a spaceship; and, finally, there is David Bennent. It took me a minute to place the guy, then I got it: he was the man-child at the heart of Volker Schlöndorff’s "The Tin Drum," and here, in his tiny white coat, he struck me as no less mad and sad.
According to Dr. Schiller, Progeia faltered because funds intended for research had been creamed off by the cats, or cat, at the top. What Lee is aiming at, in brief, is Enronland: drugs instead of energy, but the same aroma of rot. Heaven knows we need moviemakers to start rooting around in the comical cupidity of recent scandals; for a director like Lee, whose store of indignation is inexhaustible, the possibilities could hardly be riper, and, as the opening credits ripple with the face of George W. Bush on an imaginary three-dollar bill, everything is set for an angry movie. It is thus with bewilderment, and with more than a trickle of dismay, that one watches the story-and, with it, the promise of wrath-take such a peculiar turn. Jack Armstrong, having reported his employer to the financial authorities, is fired for having blown the whistle. We expect him to pursue the fight, instead of which he goes home to his apartment, hears the bell, opens the door, and discovers his former fiancée, Fatima (Kerry Washington), and her new lesbian Latina lover, Alex (Dania Ramirez), who stroll in and request that Jack impregnate both of them, for the sum of five thousand dollars each. Say what?
I would claim that the rest of "She Hate Me" comes across as a withering investigation of American mores, were it not for a lingering suspicion that what we have here is a major filmmaker getting his minor rocks off. Jack needs the money, his broody ex needs the sperm, and as for Spike Lee, I think he just feels the need. So our hero, valiantly breaching the fortress of Fatima’s lingerie, not only does the job but does it so well that she passes him on to her envious friends. Before we know it, his threshold is awash with lesbians, all of whom have sickened of adoption agencies or anonymous donors, and each of whom is prepared to pay top dollar. The director even gets to arrange a montage of women-ranging from the Jewish to the Asian-American, from the mousy to the martially butch, from the beast to the blonde-making hay with the increasingly exhausted Jack. The giveaway, in almost every case, is that the women appear to have a high old time, releasing a succession of hetero howls, and the implication is that with the right motive, and the right man, lesbians could be guided back to the straight and narrow. Maybe she hate me, but, hey, she love it really.
This is the sheerest male fantasy, and it reinforces the sense that Lee, whose sensitivity to color and shade, within his compositions, remains unimpaired, is far less delicate when he turns to broader emotional shadings-to lives beyond the ambit of his hero. This was not always the case; few directors have attempted the kind of fraying social patchwork that Lee stitched together for "Do the Right Thing," and his fans could be forgiven a rueful sigh as they watch John Turturro, who fit so neatly into the earlier picture, looking so misplaced in the new one. He plays a Mafia don, whose ethereal daughter is among Jack’s contented clients. She is played by Monica Bellucci, no less, and, if there’s one thing we can say for sure about Ms. Bellucci, it’s that in no configuration of the universe could she ever have been spawned by John Turturro. All this strikes me as dabbling, or game-playing, on the part of Lee. He is no more concerned with the realities of organized crime than he is with the childbearing dilemmas of gay professionals. He just wants to stir things up, scattering his visual ardor with as much abandon as Jack demonstrates in casting his seed.
Defenders of this movie will argue that the zip and crackle of Lee’s technique are themselves worth the price of a ticket; that only with such freakish energy can a director hope to meet the outrages visited upon the body politic; and that it takes somebody of Lee’s nerve to raise one of the most grubby of racial prejudices-the belief that African-American men are prodigal with their paternity-and then not merely dramatize it but defend it. And defend it Lee does. The movie closes, with undisguised benignity, on a scene of multi-ethnic bliss, as a throng of lesbians cuddle their mini-Jacks. More touching still is the sequence back at Jack’s house, in which he kisses first Fatima, who is holding a new baby, and then, after a hilariously thoughtful pause, the lovely Alex, who is also holding her baby, and who, having hitherto scorned Jack as the merest fertilizer, has now found room for him in her heart. So that’s the future for American family values: the sentimental threesome. It sounds a funky option, though whether it will survive a broken night of double infant pain-one croup, one colic-I would not care to say.
And what, you may ask, has any of this to do with Progeia? The only connection I can glimpse is that a possible cure for aids, thwarted by greed, is swiftly followed by a long advertisement for unprotected sex with multiple partners. Am I alone in finding the logic of this a mite unfortunate? The film does try to wrestle the various components into place, as Jack is framed by his former bosses, hauled before a Senate committee, publicly quizzed about his career as a stud, and finally acquitted, to the squeals and whoops of his supporters. But even the most charitable viewer may be forced to concede that, in this instance, the case of Lee vs. America should be dismissed for lack of evidence. In the eyes of the director, Jack’s truth-telling was threatened and censored because he was black; the rest of us, however, can hardly remember what the truth consisted of in the first place-come on, it was more than two hours ago.
"She Hate Me" must therefore count as an opportunity lost. Lee is too much of a live wire to maintain the kind of attack that Michael Mann, for instance, launched against corporate devilry in "The Insider," and Anthony Mackie, taking his first leading role, as Jack, cannot hope to generate the steady incandescence that Denzel Washington brought to "Malcolm X." Only once does everything click, when Mackie wanders through Times Square, tracked by a handheld camera, and we see his suit and tie, the protective garb of the urban predator, drop away in a single cut, to be replaced by a shapeless coat and a squashy hat. Inside of a minute, the movie has dressed him down (listen for the sarcastic suavity of a saxophone in the background), and we are reminded of the dire deceleration with which those in the money, white as well as black, can tumble into the ranks of the dispossessed.
How can a director capable of such grace turn around and crack us over the head with a paranoid bad dream? But here it is: a sudden, scuzzy flashback to, of all things, the Watergate break-in-a reminder that Frank Wills, the black security guard who first noted the entrance of the thieves, was discarded by society for his pains. Jack, before the Senate committee, claims spiritual fellowship with Wills-although, from where I was sitting, Jack’s moment in the limelight looked fairly triumphant. Maybe he was still relishing the animated sequence in which his noble features, alternating between grin and grimace, are-wait for it-superimposed upon a crowd of eager sperm, wiggling toward those high-paying ovaries. And, when they get there, the eggs, too, are smiling with delight: see the rapture on Monica Bellucci’s face at the instant of conception. How strange to reflect that, while so many parties-lesbians, Bush supporters, aids sufferers-may find cause for complaint in "She Hate Me," the one institution that may consider itself vindicated is the Roman Catholic Church.