director
Spike Lee
producers
Spike Lee
Samuel D. Pollard
cinematographer
Ellen Kuras
music
Terence Blanchard
editor
Samuel D. Pollard
cast
Maxine McNair
Chris McNair
Helen Pegues
Alpha Robertson
Shirley Wesley King
Janie Gaines
Junie Collins
George Wallace
Walter Cronkite
Andrew Young
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
Bill Cosby
Reggie White
Rev. Jesse Jackson
Coretta Scott King
Ossie Davis
Eddie Holcey
mpaa rating: none
running
time: 102m
u.s.
release: 7/11/97
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other spike
lee joints
reviewed on this website:
- bamboozled
- clockers
- get on the bus
- he got game
- malcolm x
- summer of sam
- 25th hour
|
Perhaps
the strangest thing in Spike Lee's Oscar-nominated documentary
4 Little Girls is the recent footage of George Wallace,
the old segregationist himself, so enfeebled by age and his assassination-related
frailty that Lee has to provide subtitles for his slurred speech.
Lee has shown us the famous footage of Wallace blocking the school
entrance (it's the same clip that appears in Forrest
Gump), and now Lee shows us an old man eager to seem
misunderstood. Sitting at a desk with a can of Diet Pepsi prominently
displayed (what a product placement!), Wallace keeps repeating
that his best friend is black. "Ed," he beckons, "c'mere.
Been all over the world with him." Ed the black best friend
obediently stands next to Wallace, his expression unreadable
and faintly embarrassed. Spike Lee stays off camera throughout
4 Little Girls (we hear him asking a few questions), but
I would pay good money to have seen his face when he was interviewing
Wallace.
The Wallace segment is part of Lee's condensed history lesson
in the middle of 4 Little Girls, which begins with tragedy
and then establishes the historical context for it. As Joan Baez's
cover of "Birmingham Sunday" plays on the soundtrack,
Lee pans across the graves of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins,
Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley -- the girls who died in
the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama. Denise was 11; the others were 14. Four broken columns
in a memorial represent four lives cut short.
Aside from some Oliver Stone-ish touches -- abrupt fades to white;
jittery zooms into file photos -- Lee's style here is unflashy
and uncluttered. He sets a camera in front of his subjects --
survivors, friends and relatives of the girls, activists and
journalists -- and lets them talk, intercutting a generous amount
of newsreels and pictures. Some may debate Lee's judgment in
keeping the camera on a weeping relative for a few beats too
long, or slashing us with shock-cut morgue photos of the mutilated
girls. But even these moments play less as lapses of taste than
as necessary, visceral reminders of the horror of the events
of September 15, 1963.
I don't really know why Lee interviewed Bill Cosby (he doesn't
say much that any of us couldn't have said), but the rest of
his choices (including Wallace) are impeccable. We listen to
the deep sadness of Chris McNair (father of Denise) remembering
Denise's first encounter with racism, or the resigned grace of
Alpha Robertson (mother of Carole) renouncing any hatred of the
man who killed her daughter, and we may wonder if we would have
the strength to endure what they did. And such activists as Andrew
Young and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth are living history texts illuminating
the fear and loathing (and hope) of the era.
If there is any justice, Lee will finally take home a statuette
on Oscar night. His filmmaking here may be simple, but it has
the beauty of simplicity and the shadings of compassion (an aspect
that has brightened the often-overlooked recent work of this
once-angry director). Aided by rich photography by Ellen Kuras
(who shot, brilliantly, Tom Kalin's 1992 Swoon) and a
subtly moving score by Terence Blanchard, Lee has crafted a lovely
piece of work about one of the ugliest chapters in American history. |