director/screenwriter
Spike Lee
producers
Spike Lee
Jon Kilik
cinematographer
Ellen Kuras
music
Terence Blanchard
editor
Sam Pollard
cast
Damon Wayans (Pierre Delacroix)
Savion Glover (Manray/Mantan)
Jada Pinkett Smith (Sloan)
Tommy Davidson (Womack/Sleep 'n' Eat)
Michael Rapaport (Dunwitty)
Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Honeycutt)
Paul Mooney (Junebug)
Mos Def (Big Black Africa)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 136m
u.s.
release: 10/6/00
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other spike
lee joints
reviewed on this website:
- clockers
- 4 little girls
- get on the bus
- he got game
- malcolm x
- summer of sam
- 25th hour
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For about the first hour of
Spike Lee's ballsy satire Bamboozled, I couldn't understand
why so many critics had slammed it. It seemed fresh and biting
-- maybe too fresh and biting for some people? Somewhat
smugly, I decided that the majority of critics just didn't get
it, couldn't deal with it, whatever. Then, around the 90-minute
mark, the movie started to go bad. And that isn't even the bad
news. The bad news is that there's another 46 minutes to go --
plenty of time for it to get even worse. Which it does.
In Bamboozled, Spike
Lee falls into the same trap that Oliver Stone did with Natural Born Killers: he makes a hammer-headed
media satire, wielding a baseball bat where a scalpel would do
more damage, and reiterates the same unsurprising points over
and over. Like Stone, Lee falls on his ass when he tries
to be funny. He's not a natural at comedy, even though many of
his films do have hilarious moments; his humor tends to arise
organically out of characters, particularly in the blinkered
or self-righteous ways they express themselves, and there is
some riotous character comedy in Bamboozled. Yet it all
eventually gets buried under Lee's ambitions and preaching: This
is an important movie, and around about that 90-minute
equator you can just about feel the click as Lee shifts
into important-movie mode. What should have been a fast, scalding
hour and a half sprawls out to two hours and sixteen minutes,
becoming, by the end, a flabby and melodramatic morality play.
Lee is annoyed (and saddened)
that the only black-themed shows on television are crude comedies
-- the millennial equivalents of minstrel shows. Bamboozled
has flowered out of his anger, yet it feels less angry than,
well, amateurish -- a Saturday Night Live sketch done
at laborious length. Lee's premise glistens with possibility.
Self-hating TV writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) can't get
any of his pilots produced on his network, CNS. His boss, the
loutish Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), browbeats Pierre for not
"keeping it real" -- for not writing "black"
enough. Rapaport, easily the funniest thing in the movie, plays
this obnoxious clown so exuberantly -- pumping his fist in appreciation
of his own tastelessness -- that he single-handedly achieves
Lee's stated goal of comedy that you know you shouldn't laugh
at but can't help laughing at. In his early scenes, at least,
Rapaport takes a standard Spike Lee stereotype (the clueless
white guy marooned in ignorance) and blasts it through the roof.
(It's a pretty good joke that Rapaport is one of the "great
Negroe actors" listed on the movie's poster.)
Racking his brain to devise
a hip, cutting-edge show, Pierre finally hits upon the perfect
idea. He's looking to get fired anyway, so he develops the idea
of a new, real minstrel show -- Mantan: The New Millennium
Minstrel Show, which will star two homeless guys of his acquaintance,
talented dancer Manray (played by noted dancer/choreographer
Savion Glover) and sidekick Womack (Tommy Davidson). Renamed
Mantan and Sleep 'n' Eat, respectively, the pair are hired for
the show by an enthusiastic Dunwitty, who eagerly buys Pierre's
pitch. Dunwitty doesn't realize, of course, that Pierre intends
the show as an ironic commentary on racist stereotypes, a show
so blatantly offensive that it functions as a challenge to the
network; Pierre tosses in everything from watermelons to blackface,
and Dunwitty and the network eat it up.
Soon, so does America. After
a bizarre first performance that plays to a sea of befuddled
faces in a silent studio audience, Mantan eventually catches
on; people start wearing blackface and identifying themselves
as "niggers." In other words, the show Pierre has ironically
created out of contempt for popular taste backfires on him, and
he has to watch as it snowballs into a huge success, and then
live it down. Lee makes incisive points about the price of selling
out, the appropriation of black culture, the way popular media
turns everything into fodder. For a while, the movie seems to
be playing in the same ballpark as Network. Pierre has
an assistant, Sloan (Jada Pinkett Smith), whose clownish brother
Big Black Africa (Mos Def) hangs with a faux-militant posse calling
themselves the Mau Maus; they, too, want to get on television.
But as Mantan picks up steam, they look on in disgust,
not really recognizing that they, with their gangsta pose and
Black Panther Lite pretensions, embody stereotypes almost as
grotesque as the blackface Mantan and Sleep 'n' Eat.
For a long while, Lee has fun
tossing darts; you can feel him working out some of his frustration
over the crap you see on UPN. But then, rather abruptly, the
movie goes to hell. It begins by turning moralistic. Pierre starts
suffering and even hallucinating (maybe) because his guilt and
shame over his success are rotting him inside. Damon Wayans,
who brings a clipped sense of play to his early scenes as the
pompous Pierre with his piss-elegant accent and fake name, starts
to falter in his later scenes of anguish. Pointlessly, the question
of whether Sloane slept with Pierre to get her job becomes an
issue because Manray, just as pointlessly, has developed feelings
for her. Manray and Womack have a falling out, as do Pierre and
Sloane in the first of many awful scenes. Even Dunwitty stops
being funny and becomes a braying annoyance. Meanwhile, the Mau
Maus -- who had seemed like harmless goofballs -- start plotting
to kidnap Manray and murder him on a live cybercast. What?
Where'd that come from?
It was a mistake, I think,
for Lee to take such a sharp left turn into melodrama. Bamboozled
ends up feeling just as conventional as any Hollywood drama made
for grandmothers. The satire becomes less and less focused; when
Pierre accepts an award for the show from presenter Matthew Modine,
he first compliments Modine on his fine work in Rumble Fish
and Wild Things (confusing him with Matt Dillon, unhilariously),
then attempts to give his award to Modine, á la Ving Rhames
at the Emmys forcing Jack Lemmon to take his trophy. The scene
isn't funny, just mortifying. So is Mantan itself, though
it seems meant to be funny in spite of itself -- you're supposed
to thrill to Savion Glover's moves and laugh at Tommy Davidson's
antics while at the same time being appalled at the context.
It doesn't work out that way; even Glover's quicksilver tapping
seems off, because at that point you're watching Savion Glover,
an artist in his own right, trapped in another artist's off-kilter
conception. It would be nice to say that Glover rises above his
blackface and "coon" costumes and achieves dignity
through dance, but the heaviness of the atmosphere drags him
down.
Lee throws all this racist
iconography -- the cotton, the watermelons, the montages of old
movie clips and cartoons and tar-baby toys and posters -- onto
the screen, but what's his point? That we haven't progressed
much past the overt racism of the past? In Natural Born Killers,
I didn't buy the notion that America would idolize Mickey and
Mallory (more likely, America would be scared shitless of them).
Similarly, in Bamboozled I don't really buy the idea that
blackface and ancient racist stereotypes could become such a
hit in America; even if Lee is using it as a reductio ad absurdum
in theory, in practice and at such length it strains credulity
(another reason why the movie needed to be shorter). And
one could reasonably question why some of the black comedy shows
deserve scorn; after all, comedy is comedy, not public
relations, and who would argue that the white people in a Farrelly
brothers movie or an Adam Sandler movie stand for all white people?
True, most of the shuck and jive stuff of the past played a sizable
role in dehumanizing blacks, but if a black performer today just
wants to make people laugh, what's he or she supposed to do?
Check with Spike Lee first to make sure his or her act is sufficiently
dignified? Such criticism of modern-day "minstrel shows,"
while sometimes valid, sounds a little odd coming from Spike
Lee, whose character Mars Blackmon in his debut feature She's
Gotta Have It (as well as in several Nike commercials) was,
not to put too fine a point on it, pretty much a clown.
Bamboozled is a mess -- or turns into a mess,
anyway -- and it's a particularly painful mess, because it begins
so well and has such promise. I didn't hate it -- it didn't make
me angry, as Lee's Jungle Fever did -- but I came away
from it numbed into indifference, a fatal response to what aims
so strenuously to be corrosive satire. Lee gets locked into a
double-tragic finale, and it feels completely unearned and synthetic.
Wouldn't the satire be bolder if the show were a huge success
and everyone involved were happy with it, and then, as
always happens, Mantan started losing popularity and was
eventually bumped aside in favor of an even more offensive
show (possibly produced by the Mau Maus)? Instead, Pierre and
Manray become martyrs for the entertainment of the masses and
God knows what else. But really it's the movie that gets martyred.
Spike Lee may have gotten bamboozled by his own madly conflicting
ambitions. As a presence and as a talent, he may be too intimidating;
he needs, and sometimes sorely lacks, a few people in his circle
who will be honest with him when his ideas just don't cohere.
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