Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods a winner; The Booksellers a gentle, wistful, eccentric documentary

Spike Lee’s DA 5 Bloods is an epic story about how wars never end.

Isiah Whitlock Jr, Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo and Jonathan Majors in a scene from Da 5 Bloods.

Spike Lee’s DA 5 Bloods, an epic about how wars never end, is a remarkable movie that manages to blend bits of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Lee even playfully steals a line of dialogue from the last, which came out in 1948.

There are times when it looks like a documentarian is lurking in the wings, urging the insertion of archival footage — a Buddhist monk’s self-­immolation, a girl burned by napalm, a speech by Martin Luther King Jnr — but over the top of all of this is Lee himself, cajoling along what is perhaps his most ambitious film yet.

At 154 minutes, there are moments when the plot does become a bit loose and baggy. There are times when the characters almost skate off the edge of satire. But none of this reduces its power. It grabs from the opening sequence, a ­series of file shots shifting between the Vietnam War and black rights, and never lets go.

That opening ends with a black and white photograph of da bloods of the title: five African-American soldiers who fought in the same unit during the Vietnam War. Only four of them are alive today. The squad leader, “Stormin’ Norman” (played by Chadwick Boseman, best known as Black Panther), died on the battlefield. We will learn how later.

The four surviving members of this band of brothers, Paul (English actor Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jnr), are in their late 60s. We meet them in Ho Chi Minh City, today. They have flown there to do something they have been waiting most of their lives to do: to retrieve Norman’s remains and the strongbox full of gold bars that was lost when a CIA plane, en route to bribe Vietnamese rebels, crashed.

All four men have issues. The one who shows it most obviously is Paul, who is accompanied by his adult son, David (Jonathan Majors), a young black man who has never held a gun.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is perhaps just the beginning of Paul. Lindo’s performance is extraordinary. He is the one who comes closest to breaking the thin wall between drama and spoof, to going all Tropic Thunder, but he doesn’t. Here’s how he describes himself at one decisive moment, looking towards the camera, but not into it: “Let me tell you something. I am the motherf..ker. I am the motherf..ker. I am the motherf..ker. I am the motherf..ker.” He wears a Make America Great Again baseball cap, an item that almost becomes a character in its own right.

Paul is full of patriotism and shame. He looks like he wants revenge. The question is: on who?

There’s a superb scene soon after the men land. In a bar, drinking cocktails with small umbrellas sticking out of them, they spot a couple of wizened, long-bearded locals looking over at them. They’re told the men are former Vietcong and they have shouted the latest round of drinks. Paul is aggressive in his response to this but Otis intervenes. “Raise your goddam glass. The American War is over.”

The old enemies toast each other. Yet Otis isn’t right.

The men hook up with a young local guide (Johnny Tri Nguyen), who has his own war ­stories, and a white-suited (therefore devious) French (therefore devious) financial go-between (Jean Reno in a wonderful extended cameo). The bloods and the guide head off on their treasure hunt. As they boat upriver, we hear Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

Lee inserts footage of all five men together in combat. He persuaded Netflix to let him shoot this on 16mm, meaning it comes up narrower, with black borders, on the TV screen.

He also refused to digitally de-age the four survivors, so in the war sequences, we have four 60-plus men serving under the youthful Boseman. This is close to perfect. The war has not ended, for the dead or for the living. All five men are indelibly marked by that time. They fought for a country that in return gave them, to quote Norman, nothing but “a boot up our black asses’’.

Lee starts this war footage slowly and builds it to close to overwhelming. In one scene, the men, hidden in the jungle, can hear a group of Vietcong soldiers who are walking towards them. One mentions the scarf his wife has packed for him. Another starts talking about poetry.

We know this thanks to the subtitles. The GIs do not know this and mow them down. They would have mowed them down regardless. This is a war where everyone suffered and no-one won. And as the movie reaches its climax, there are times when the 50-year-old war and today become one and the same, particularly for Paul. As the MA15+ rating indicates, there is a lot of ­violence, all of it pointless, all of it inevitable.

Lee made this movie before George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in May, leading to worldwide protests that continue today. This could be seen as prescient. It is and it isn’t.

The oppression of black Americans has been going on since the founding fathers. Some file footage shows a Black Lives Matter meeting. That group was founded in 2013.

“War is about money. Money is about war,’’ Norman tells his soldiers in a prepare-for-battle speech. “Every time I walk out my front door I see cops patrolling my neighbourhood like it’s some kind of police state. I can feel just how much I ain’t worth.”

Like Lee’s previous feature, the Oscar-­nominated BlacKkKlansman, this is a good movie to watch on Netflix. A lot of viewers, I think, will want to see it more than once.

Da 5 Bloods (MA15+)

Netflix

★★★★

David Bergman in The Booksellers.

One of my favourites scenes in Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa is when Berkeley Cole (a brilliant Michael Kitchen) remembers a time when one of Denys Finch Hatton’s friends borrowed a book and did not return it.

He recalls asking what he thought was a rhetorical question, “You wouldn’t lose a friend over a book, would you?”, and Denys’s reply, “No, but he has, hasn’t he?”

On that basis, Finch Hatton is the target audience for The Booksellers, a gentle, wistful, eccentric documentary about antiquarian book dealers and their hopes for the future in this digitalised world. This movie, directed by DW Young and produced by actress Parker Posey, who also does some narration, is centred in Manhattan. There is an interesting side trip to a warehouse space in New Jersey, where one collector/dealer has more than 300,000 books and some stuffed seagulls.

The book dealer who makes me laugh is David Bergman. At one point he shows an ancient book of fold-out diagrams of fish, all life-size. “Eat your heart out Playboy,’’ he says while unfolding what might have been the Cod of the Month.

It’s a joke that goes to the heart of the story. Is there a future for rare books at a time when most people read on their phones? It’s not noted here, but Playboy itself is moving out of the print world to go digital only.

The booksellers fall into two groups: the pessimists and the optimists. Leading the latter is Rebecca Romney, who is also the only one with a public profile, thanks to the successful TV series Pawn Stars.

There are also enlivening interviews with writers such as Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and Fran Lebowitz.

However, I’m only able to tell you that because I either knew them by sight (Lebowitz) or I read the end credits. A surprising oversight in this movie, given it’s about the value of the printed word, is the lack of captions to identify who is being interviewed.

The most interesting parts, for this owner of far too many books, are the discussions of book bindings (including some made of human skin), dust jackets, added extras such as an author’s signature, and how to judge the condition, and therefore value, of a rare book.

That question of value is elusive. There’s a funny moment, shown in archival footage from 1994, at a Christie’s auction of The Codex Hammer, as it was known then, by Leonardo da Vinci. The auctioneer opens the bidding at “55 hundred” before catching himself, smiling a little red-faced and correcting it to $US5.5m. When the hammer came down, at $US30m, the winning bidder, who bought the book sight unseen, was Bill Gates.

The Booksellers (PG)

Selected cinemas

★★½