A powerful pageant of war, race and redemption, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (USA, 2020) is a film of sweeping and serious ambitions. There are many threads to his narrative, and they aren’t all seen through successfully, but the film overall is cohesive, instructive, and grimly but undeniably entertaining.
Four black Viet Nam veterans reunite in Ho Chi Minh City in the present day: Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Otis (Clarke Peters) and Paul (Delroy Lindo). They’ve come here to re-enter the jungle fifty years later and, assisted by current satellite / gps technology, recover the body of Da 5th Blood, their former squad leader, Sgt. Norman Holloway (Chadwick Boseman), for whom they’ve arranged a funeral with honors at Arlington National Cemetery. But this particular unit also left behind a large steel cargo-case full of U.S. gold bars, salvaged from a C47 plane wreck the squad found in 1971, and that same satellite / gps technology reveals the likelihood that it’s accessible again after being irretrievably buried.
Otis has made arrangements with a trustworthy former lover from that time, Tiên (Lê Y Lan), to find a broker who can handle the gold transaction. Her associate, Desroche (Jean Reno), agrees to convert the gold and make monetary deposits in Macao, where the bloods can then withdraw the money from anywhere, but he takes a sizeable cut. Otis saves the agreement for themselves and Desroche from a derisive and distrustful Paul, who carries hard resentments about black exploitation in general, and his own contentious life in particular. Paul is further incensed when his son, David (Jonathan Majors) arrives at their hotel unannounced. He’s concerned about his addled ex-con, PTSD-riddled father, but he’s also looking for his own part of the gold as well.
Their tense and eventful trek back into the jungle (paralleled with flashbacks from their wartime experiences in 1971,) form the main body of the narrative. But, these days, the jungle is still occupied – not only by a UN-sponsored organization disarming thousands of unexploded mines left behind, but also by small armed squads of rural natives who must constantly guard against fortune-hunting exploiters and opportunists (arguably, not unlike our 4 Bloods) even years later.
Spike Lee is always reliable for compelling storytelling in a quick and efficient manner; he wastes little of the 154-minute length of the film, and displays convincing command of the genre (and the insistent doses of aggro-testosterone that typically fuel it). He’s made an excellent war movie. The truths he relates about the state of black culture in the mid-century United States, and how blacks and the poor were (and still are) exploited to fight rich white men’s wars are urgently important, and most of that content effectively informs individual events, scenes and characters in the story. Some of his character strokes are a bit broad, and a plot-line or two seems superfluous or underdone, but Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography is superb and Terence Blanchard’s music score is unobtrusive but inventively evocative.
The major reason to see this very good film, though, is Delroy Lindo’s larger-than-life Paul, as big and involving a lead performance as I’ve seen in any film in quite a few years. He’s a fascinating monster; irascible, hot-tempered and selfishly indignant, but so truthfully steeped in the details of his own hard life’s experiences that you follow along with him, even at his scariest. It’s masterful, and he’s the chalk for this year’s Best Actor Oscar…
…although many film viewers are equally enthusiastic about Riz Ahmad’s electric-yet-surgically-precise performance in Darius Marder’s Sound Of Metal (USA, 2020).
Ruben (Ahmed) and Lou (Olivia Cooke) are a musical duo, Blackgammon, performing heavy metal of near-punishing levels of volume and aggression; she’s the guitar player and lead singer, he’s the drummer. One day, while setting up the pre-show merch table, Ruben experiences a sudden drop and muffling in his hearing. Saying nothing, he struggles through the subsequent show, but then goes to get checked by a doctor the next day. There he learns he’s lost roughly 80% of his hearing, and it won’t be back. Ruben starts figuring how he can get tens of thousands of dollars for cochlear implants (a seemingly instant fix), but he’s first persuaded to join a rural community of other deaf ex-addicts in order to learn how to live and cope as a genuinely deaf person.
Ruben thinks he’s being a good sport by going along with this “deaf” thing until he can get implants and pick up where they left off, but Lou won’t reunite with Ruben until they can do it safely for him, and she’s not allowed to stay at the compound. She, of course, has her own issues; her mother was a suicide, and she’s inclined to hurt herself when things seem to overwhelm her. In the four years they’ve been together, Ruben and Lou have, honestly, saved each other’s lives.
The film is about Ruben dealing with his deafness, but it’s also about Ruben dealing with it as an addict – the hard jumps from denial to urgency, what he wants to fix and what he wants to blow up, and which voices he chooses to listen to at what times. In this regard, his scenes at the compound with Joe (Paul Raci) are compelling. Joe knows exactly how Ruben can reconcile his life, but Ruben has to find his own way there – it needs to be his idea.
I had some issues with the narrative structure, and it’s alarmingly choppy and abrupt for having a running time a bit over two hours (I don’t think that’s only a style choice), but the story is excellent, the performances are solid (especially Riz Ahmed, in well-calibrated command of practically every frame of the film), and Nicolas Becker’s sound design is superb, uncannily and empathetically including us in Ruben’s sensory journey. If you can sit through some pretty challenging music for the first five or so minutes, the rest of the film is very impressive, and certainly worth seeing.
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