I tried to give Spike Lee’s new movie Highest 2 Lowest every possible chance to have a powerful impact — so much so that I deliberately avoided rewatching the source material, Akira Kurosawa’s landmark 1963 film, High and Low, itself based on an Ed McBain novel. I haven’t seen it in decades, though I still vividly remember Toshirō Mifune’s powerhouse performance as well as just how seriously the film took the class stratification at the heart of its story.
But I needn’t have bothered. Highest 2 Lowest, which is getting a lot of critical praise even though it’s tanking at the box office, is a real mess. It’s full of strange choices that pull the audience’s attention all over the place, along with an overarching sensibility of Boomer nostalgia for supposedly better times that’s pretty shocking.
When it comes to the strange choices, look no further than the opening scene featuring a classic showtune from Oklahoma! (“Oh What a Beautiful Morning”) sung with manly brio over impossibly glossy shots of New York City. All that rural imagery called up by the cowboy singer is matched to oddly empty but soaring shots of cement-and-steel canyons and skyscrapers and lofty penthouses. At the song’s crescendo, we meet music mogul David King (Denzel Washington), who is on the phone trying to make a deal while gazing out from the loftiest penthouse of them all.
You’re left thinking, well, that peculiar song choice has gotta be satirizing something? Maybe Lee’s mocking the corny camp qualities its accumulated over almost eighty years as a contrapuntal force against clashing urban imagery and a depiction of contemporary creative life in black America? But apparently not. Nothing else ever happens in the film to develop anything significant about that peculiar choice. It just happens to be a nice morning in New York City, and David King is a powerful figure in this world. That’s it.
King, on this particular morning, isn’t…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
