BlacKkKlansman, On Chesil Beach: film reviews
BlacKkKlansman, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, is Spike Lee’s best work since Do The Right Thing.
Spike Lee made the unforgettable Do the Right Thing back in 1989 and, since then, though he has made some solid, interesting feature films and documentaries, he has never quite attained the heights of that incendiary masterpiece. BlacKkKlansman, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year, is his best work since then. It’s a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
The screenplay, by Lee, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott, is based on a book by Ron Stallworth in which the author tells an amazing story of his experiences in the early 1970s when he became the first African-American hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department.
The film opens with that famous scene from Gone With the Wind in which Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara searches among the thousands of wounded soldiers lying on the ground in the Atlanta railway yard while the camera cranes up above them to a tattered flag of the Confederacy. This memorable image is followed by recreated documentary footage in which a white supremacist (Alec Baldwin) launches a diatribe about the dangers of a “mongrel nation” and warns that America’s whites are “under attack” from Jewish-controlled puppets, while powerful sequences from DW Griffith’s cinematically innovative but politically reprehensible The Birth of a Nation fill the screen.
The story proper begins as Afro-haired Stallworth (John David Washington) joins the small-town police force and is sent to work in archives by the chief of police (Robert John Burke). Before long he’s promoted to undertake undercover work, and in this capacity he attends a fiery speech delivered by black radical Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). Subsequently he takes it on himself to telephone the local leader of the Ku Klux Klan, giving his real name, and inquiring about becoming a member of “the organisation”, as KKK members call themselves.
It seems as though this apparently impulsive idea will backfire when Stallworth is invited to meet Klan leaders face-to-face. One of his fellow cops, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), volunteers to stand in for him, though there are problems involving voice recognition and the fact that Flip is a Jew and the Klan is notoriously anti-Semitic. Eventually Stallworth establishes regular phone contact with the Grand Wizard of the Klan himself: David Duke (Topher Grace).
Lee’s direction of this bizarre tale is a supremely confident mix of the horrific and the comical. The Klan’s ugly philosophies are never forgotten, yet most of the Klansmen we meet are ridiculous figures, as ignorant as they are dangerous. They include the fanatical Felix (Jasper Paakkonen), his chubby and cheerful wife, Connie (Ashlie Atkinson) — who is just as eager to plant a bomb at a gathering of African-Americans as she is to prepare cookies for evenings at home with Klan buddies — and the gormless Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser).
It’s hard to take these fanatics seriously, but at the end of this dazzling, troubling movie Lee delivers a masterstroke, bringing the narrative right up to date with TV footage of the race riots that occurred in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in August last year, the provocations of Klan members, led by the still active Duke, and President Donald Trump’s reaction to the violence.
The film has some flaws. A romance between Stallworth and an Angela Davis-like activist (Laura Harrier) could have been dispensed with, for example, but its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses.
A scene in which Harry Belafonte, playing a veteran African-American leader, delivers a passionate speech will be seared in my memory for a long time to come.
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I’m old enough to remember 1962 and how it was back then for inexperienced young people to stumble their way awkwardly into an intimate relationship. Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella, On Chesil Beach, dealt sensitively with this theme and British theatre director Dominic Cooke, making his first feature film, has directed McEwan’s own screenplay adaptation as well as could possibly be imagined.
Back in that distant past when sex before marriage was the exception rather than the norm, it was not uncommon for the bride or groom, or both, to still be virginal on the night of their wedding, and so it is here.
Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) and his bride, Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan), arrive at a seaside hotel in Dorset for their honeymoon. He’s a student of history, she’s a violinist, and flashbacks show that they met at a rally of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Scenes with their two families — invented by McEwan for his screenplay — add to the revelations. Her parents (Emily Watson, Samuel West) are snobs, while his mother (Anne-Marie Duff), who is brain-damaged as the result of a tragic accident on a railway station platform, is cared for by his kindly father (Adrian Scarborough).
Their courtship includes a visit to the cinema to see one of the seminal British films of the period, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, a provocative drama in which the young heroine is “knocked up” by a West Indian.
It soon becomes clear that Florence is petrified of sexual intimacy, and the reasons for this become clearer as the film proceeds. Edward is unable to comprehend, and because he has no experience himself he is hardly in a position to offer any useful advice. The wedding night, as a result, is a disaster, the more so because the pair clearly and genuinely care for one another.
Ronan and Howle are painfully impressive in these scenes, and Cooke and his collaborators on the technical side add to the mood with the accurately depicted awfulness of this seaside hotel with its snobbish staff and unfamiliar, formal surroundings.
McEwan’s book was divided between the viewpoints of Edward and Florence and contained little dialogue; neither of them was very capable of expressing their feelings out loud. This has changed in the film, where the emphasis is marginally more on Florence than on Edward, but not to the detriment of the essential challenges facing the relationship.
Two codas, one set in 1975, the other in 2007, add immeasurably to the drama and elevate the film to a fresh level of intensity. And the final scenes, that take us back to that eponymous beach, a beach composed of pebbles rather than sand, are simply superb, and offer an object lesson in how to use the wide screen.
Admirers of the 166-page book may quarrel over the ways in which the author has seen fit to write the screen adaptation, given that he has augmented the scenes that take place before the marriage but omitted incidents that occur later. It’s an interesting approach, and for me it worked beautifully.
After Lady Bird, Ronan has established herself as one of the screen’s leading young actresses, and her beautiful, painfully honest performance here amply reinforces that view. Howle, who appeared in Dunkirk and who will soon be seen in a fine new screen adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, is another young and gifted British actor. These fine actors vividly bring McEwan’s troubled lovers to life.
BlacKkKlansman (MA 15+) 4 stars
National release from Thursday
On Chesil Beach (M) 4 stars
National release
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