Jungle Fever

Flipper Purify is a successful architect with a beautiful wife and a smart young daughter back at his apartment. When he gets a new temp in to work alongside him he is not pleased that she is white but her hard work impresses him. Working late one night, chatting becomes a connection which becomes flirting which becomes sex. Their affair continues even as Flipper quits his job to branch out alone. However his life is thrown into chaos when his wife Drew finds out.

The opening credits are catchy and the material is just the sort of racial issue that Spike Lee made his name but somehow the film itself really failed to catch my imagination or hold my attention. The central plot is simple enough but Lee fills it out with characters, debate and a couple of subplots but yet somehow doesn't manage to pull it all together into one compelling film. Of course those that like Spike Lee know that even when he is at his most average he can still make an interesting film. And so it is here because the film does have plenty of interesting scenes but it is the narrative and formulation of his point where it fails to come off. In his defence Lee has written some convincingly real characters with unfortunately real attitudes but by leaving these people mostly unchallenged to deliver their opinions he allows two things to happen. Firstly the film feels like a series of disjointed conversations – most of which are interesting enough to listen to but don't a total film make.

Secondly, and more importantly, Lee appears to be in agreement with some of his characters that mixed race relationships are not a good idea. If this is not his opinion then he has done a poor job in putting his thoughts across. If he is in agreement then he has done a poor job in presenting this point in a coherent and convincing fashion. Instead it seems like the racists have won – which is maybe is his point but if so yet again he hasn't done a good job of putting it across. In fact thinking about it, his point probably is that it all isn't worth the effort but, like I say, it isn't very well delivered and a lot of the ideas are half-cooked. The cast make it well worth a look regardless thanks to Lee's usual skill in assembling his actors. Snipes has massively fallen from grace in regards his career and his personal life but here he is pretty good. The material is just a little beyond his range but he does the basics well. Sciorra is better and works well with him. Lee is Lee while McKee is rather wasted with her simplistic race rage. Quinn is a nice touch in support while Turturro is as good as I have come to expect from him. Davis and Dee are good but they exist in another film, albeit the drugs subplot is interesting and both Jackson and Berry are impressive but it doesn't really fit. Lee's direction is his usual style but his use of soundtrack is weak – the tunes themselves are good but he doesn't put them across the film with any reason or sense of meaning.

Overall then an fitfully interesting film as is usually the way with Lee but one that failed to come together or deliver a convincing central message. The depressing message that does come across isn't that well made and as a result isn't as thought provoking as it should have been. The casting is interesting though and the performances mostly do as required in the many good individual scenes. Famous but not as good as the names attached would make you hope.

This movie is more about sex than race. Lee was quoted in the NYT as follows: "I hate this whole Hollywood process of breaking down a movie to one sentence," he said. "My films don't deal with one theme. They interweave many different things. You have to think. I'm not saying interracial relationships are impossible. Flipper and Angie are not meant to represent every interracial couple in the world. They are meant to represent two people who got together because of sexual mythology instead of love. Then they stay together because they're pushed together. They're outcasts. And since their relationship isn't based on love, when things get tough, they can't weather the storm." Thus at its core this film is a feminist critique of the nature of sexual attraction in contemporary America. These folks are wrong for each other but they both are stereotypically "attractive." There is "chemistry" between them, but no shared values that are the bedrock of a serious relationship. The "black stud"/ "sexy white girl" is just one way this could be instantiated.

In one sense, this is a serious issue and it is worth exploring. My own misgivings about this film is that Lee's moral seems to be: values = good, chemistry = bad, and this strikes me as somewhat simplistic.

I love Spike Lee, I really do. He forces people to take a look at social situations as more than culture and things people do. He's more along the lines of why do we do what we do? His films have a distinct black voice, but provides angles from other ethnicities as well, I love that about him. He's not particularly one-sided about anything. I've always heard about this movie growing up, but never have I seen it. Well, BET decided it was time I should and showed it last Friday. I liked the way it was directed, but something about the film puzzles me. They went through all that without ever really having a yen for each other? He destroyed his marriage over a curiosity? I guess that's life, but it still unnerves me and doesn't flow with the film. Added to that, Flipper is/was staunchly pro-black, but I guess that's to show that even someone like him could dip to the other side. It was obviously a social issue of the early 90's and why successful black men decide it's time to trade up when they've made it. Apparently they think it's ok if they have enough money and that the world has changed enough that people will allow it. Personally, nothing has changed in some 40 odd years for a black men to think America's ok with him dating a white woman. Kobe's case has proved that and so did the scene where they were playing around and wrestling and someone called the cops on him cuz they thought he was raping her. Black men need to understand that the history of romantic race relations is this: White women were put on a pedestal as the epitome of beauty, desire, and purity. Black people were always the antithesis of that, but white men could jump back and forth as they pleased with no detriment to their character. Even in 2004, that mentality has a hard time going away. I liked that Flipper's father in the movie expounded upon that. Things haven't changed that much and Spike took that and ran with it to show it visually. The acting was very good for this film, because they didn't necessarily have to be, but they were great. The movie was clear, the music was cleverly applied in the right places. The scene with the women arguing about what it does to them to see black men with white women was brilliant. It seems quasi-feminist at the same time. It just has every approach and I love it. Great movie!

I saw Jungle Fever for the first time years ago, when it first came out on video. By the movie's end, I was lost. Part of it may have been maturity - I was in junior high - and part of it was that the movie I was sold was not the movie I got. Part of this selling is Stevie Wonder's title song, which frequently finds its way into my tapedeck. And the kind of color-blind love Wonder sings about is not the relationship in this movie. Something I feel now as I felt then was that the film does not let us get close to these people, let us see them in love. Only now do I realize that this is because the film is not about two people in love. When I first saw it, I thought the film was advocating segregation from the "other side." Now I realize that it just showing the complexity of issues which come to play when a black person and white person from separatist neighborhoods come together, and mostly how those environments are changed. There are things to overcome, but this relationship will not overcome them. I am still puzzled by the rather large subplot involving Samuel L. Jackson as Wesley Snipes's crackhead brother and by the final shot where Wesley Snipes clutches a crack-whore to himself and screams "NO!" while the camera rushes from halfway across Harlem to end in a close-up on him. It's indelible - most of what has stuck with me about this movie over time involves this subplot and that shot - but I am still puzzled by its intention in the overall scheme of what the film is trying to say. Something about the endless problems facing black people?

Spike Lee's films are consistent in one respect, even for the lesser ones, which is that they're always pressing buttons. In the case of Jungle Fever, it's another work where messages come out more than from a guy on a postal route. But that's perhaps part of the point, where such points come in many forms and sometimes like a barrage. This time, it doesn't completely gel as well as Lee's Do the Right Thing, which also held anger, contemplation, humor, and pathos about city life. But this time it's also a tale of sexual morays, where both white and black sides have their share of racism and prejudices, and at the core is a story of outcasts. The interesting thing then about Jungle Fever is how Lee's own decisions in casting and in the unique way he shoots his subjects and implements a subjective take more often then not trump what comes out in his script. Then again, maybe it's close to being inevitable with how the elements mix, and at the end there are some parts of the film that are the best that Lee's done so far as a filmmaker.

Wesley Snipes and Anabella Sciora star as the said 'jungle fever' couple, the man being married with a kid, of all things to a woman who is also light-skinned and with her own 'issues', and the woman having an 'old-fashioned' Italian father. When their affair becomes known to both sides, the costs come out and they both become outcasts. And at the end of all of the points that are made in Jungle Fever by Lee, even through the ones that are pounded and (of the period) quite topical and prominent, this notion of society and culture being the biggest culprit is hard to ignore. This main point is made very well by Lee's script, and even as sometimes the script doesn't have the best dialog or lines a little 'too easy', if that makes any sense, there are many scenes which do support this to the fullest. And as the job of any good director is to cast right, this film is filled with a who's-who's of professionals and character actors.

One could go on as to who appears in the film, from Anthony Quinn to Tim Robbins to Ossie Davis to John Turturro, and they all fit their parts and contribute to adding a level of fascination in each. When the less desirable aspects peak in even more, it only adds to what ends up working on screen. Sometimes the script, as mentioned, is a little derivative and trying to touch ALL bases, with a but the film is more often than not alive due to (some of) the music at times. Maybe the most genius pieces of casting were Samuel L. Jackson, in (arguably) one of his very best performances, and Halle Berry. In a sense there are similar points made in the "A" storyline and the "B" one, where there is some extra interest in the supporting characters and their connection with the main ones. Jackson and Berry are crack-heads, and outcasts, and to their own degree have the same crap end of the stick as the leads to. Among many scenes where confrontations reach a great emotional intensity, the best comes with Snipes going into the crack-house and seeing just the purest dark side of society, what really does bring people down.

In the end, Jungle Fever is one of the Lee movies that is worth seeing, that may prove on a repeat viewing to bring even more thought than previous. It's energetic, somber, occasionally funny and shocking in equal measure.