Bamboozled
Spike Lee’s first film, which he made fresh out of film school, was She’s Gotta Have It, an outrageous, interesting, passionate piece of film-making. It was a more stylistically assured and fully-realized piece of work than one is used to seeing from first-time film makers. Now Spike is all grown up, with more than a dozen films under his belt. So it’s surprising to see this veteran film maker’s latest effort, Bamboozled, which has all the earmarks of a youthful debut film: equal parts passion and outrage, audacity and fearlessness, and, most of all, sloppiness and immaturity.
Bamboozled tells the story of one Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a stuffed-shirt TV writer under pressure from his white boss (Michael Rappaport) to write a hit for the urban masses. Delacroix comes up with something that he calls “The New Millennium Minstrel Show”: a variety show that pokes fun at both racial stereotypes and the images that help to feed them. In Delacroix’s most provocative touch of all, the show is to be performed in blackface, by black actors. (It’s uncomfortable watching this satire of a satire, and that’s just how Spike Lee wants it.)
Bamboozled is successful at showing how TV has exploited and distorted black Americans since its inception. We’re horrified to see black actors in blackface, but Spike Lee demonstrates how, in many TV shows and commercials aimed at the black demographic, we are already on that same continuum. Lee uses this opportunity to lampoon everything from Colt .45 commercials, to the use of the “N” word by black people, to black sitcoms on the WB, to Ving Rhames’ attempt to give his Golden Globe to Jack Lemmon. But somewhere along the line, Lee forgot to develop his characters into full-fledged, sympathetic people, so the weight of the entire movie is forced to hang on one central idea that, without these characters, could have been told in just a few minutes.
Lee has always painted in broad strokes, but his love for character has in the past helped to offset this lack of subtlety. In Bamboozled, Lee seems to realize too late what he has done, and to overcompensate he turns the climax of the film into an over-earnest melodrama/tragedy which is, quite simply, embarrassingly bad. Spike Lee has made his most provocative movie yet; he has also made his sloppiest and least fulfilling one.
by Derek Neff