Clockers

Strike (Phifer) works as a drug runner (clocker) in a NY ghetto for dealer Rodney (Delroy Lindo). When someone kills one of Rodney's enemies Detective Klein (Keitel) investigates. Strike's brother Victor (Washington) confesses but suspicion points to Strike. Klein suspects that Victor is covering for his brother and begins to put the heat on Strike for more information.

The main plot is a form of crime thriller, with Keitel playing the cop trying to uncover the truth behind the murder. However the plot is not what this film is about - this is basically a film about the effects on drugs on the NY ghettos. Strike is the "average black man", while his protégé, Tyrone (Peewee Love) is "black youth". The film tries to show the forces placed on them by their situation, their role models and the few options they have in life. Rodney represents the draw of selling drugs, of quick money while policemen Andre (Keith David) and Klein represent his conscience trying to get him to do the right thing - Andre and Tyrone's mother (Regina Taylor) particularly doing right by your own community.

The message is at times forced, Keitel's sequence towards the end is very clever cinematically but feels a bit like a sermon, but at other times we're allowed to work it out ourselves. Strike is not judged but allowed to be pulled by the situation around him, his sickness representing the sickness of his situation. Through him we see the pressures that are on him to act like his peers and the bad role-models he has in his life. In Shorty we see the same things affect the next generation and, while his aping of Strike is clumsy, you again see how the lack of good role-models reduces the options for an otherwise intelligent kid. The best thing about the comparison of Lindo and Keitel is that neither is judged - both are allowed to show themselves as appealing, Lindo appears as a parent, almost seeking the best for all his workers and Keitel is allowed to be an honest cop with a good moral code. However both are also seen in a bad light, Lindo brings out the violence, pressure and treachery of his character - a man who is really out for himself while the way Keitel pressures Strike is seen as bad as Rodney's pressure and reveals a racist angry streak within himself. We are left wondering how anyone can survive between the two.

Phifer is good as Strike and manages to avoid just doing a ghetto-movie type of performance, he makes you believe that he is trapped in a no-win situation. Isaiah Washington gives another in a string of strong performances as the honest man trying to get by. Lindo is great as drug dealer Rodney, mixing paternal aspirations with moments of sudden viciousness. Keitel and John Turturro act below their station and aren't given much to work with, Keitel especially doesn't always manage to carry the moral core of the story without preaching. Two small roles of interest are Tom Byrd as Errol who has plays the fallen dealer with AIDS, however not enough is explained about his character, also Michael Imperioli (better known as Chris in The Sopranos) plays bent cop Jo-Jo. Peewee Love stands out as Shorty/Shorty, sucked into a world that lacks choice.

The film looks great, the whole thing has a bright colourful sheen on it that is very attractive to look at. Combined with Lee's stylish director it makes for a beautiful film - although some scenes are shot differently and on different stock, to make a point, although I'm not sure what that point is. The music is as good as most of Lee's movies, a mix of soul and hip hop, it is better than many ghetto films that just assume that the hip hop is all that's needed to help the mood.

This is a good example of the lack of options that exist in the ghetto and, besides some very obvious preaching, it makes it's point without shouting it at the audience. The only failing is that Lee bottles it near the end, delivering a sentimental ending of hope that is unfortunately not the truth in many cases.

In 1995 I considered Spike Lee's gritty CLOCKERS one of the year's best films; recently I spotted its video in a clearance bin and picked it up. Upon re-viewing, I am struck again by its complexity. It is the first urban drama to depict inner-city race relations with the intricacy such a pervasive cultural issue demands. On the surface it resembles a whodunit, but its main concern is how drugs and violence contaminate entire communities, dramatized in the collapse of one African-American youth's life. (He chokes up blood the way some of us sweat.) This process is observed by a predominantly white police force that makes hollow attempts to keep order, and refuses to intervene with the community's gradual decline.

Instead of characters with overt prejudices and plain racial allegiances-characters that are sterile symbols of bigotry rather than credible humans guilty of it-Lee gives us characters of casual racism. Most representative of this is Harvey Keitel's Rocco Klein, a white detective who cannot understand the culture surrounding him, which is a culture of narcotics, violence, and black-on-black crime. On his beat, drugs are less a problem than a lifestyle, murder resolves the tiniest of disagreements, and young mothers valiantly but vainly battle the influence young dealers have on their sons. Klein views the inner-city with contempt, but deep down he knows all the whores and dealers are human beings, too.

Klein is introduced at the scene of a homicide, where the police handle the gruesome death with a clinical sense of detachment, cracking bad jokes and asking the bloodied corpse questions. Is it just a job, or is it racism? For Klein, it's both: he needs the gallows humor to psychologically deal with this culture of depravity. What's fascinating about CLOCKERS is Lee's willingness-and guts-to present Klein, despite his prejudice, as the film's hero. Lee understands that casual racism is simply endemic and inescapable in American culture. What he appreciates is Klein's ability to transcend his own prejudice and finally do the right thing.

When Spike Lee applies his formidable talents to a genre piece like Richard Price's best selling drug noir novel, "Clockers," you might wonder what kind of hybrid you'll get. Lee is justly famous for his incendiary agitprop films of ideas which dissect race relations and urban living, sometimes at the expense of cohesive storytelling; but working with source material as thought provoking a novel as "Clockers," which is set in Lee's home base of "Crooklyn," er, i mean Brooklyn, Spike finds the right mix of action, angst, and intellectualism for his strengths to shine. "Clockers" are petty drug dealers who work around the clock pushing their wares. When one turns up dead and a stand up citizen steps up to take the fall, a homicide detective begins unraveling the complex dynamics of life and dealing in the 'hood. Lee gets his usual gritty street landscape to work with and Price gets a director with a cinematic eye (thanks to standard Lee lens-er, Malik Hassan Sayeed)and a playwright's heart. Central character brothers Isaiah Washington and Mekhi Phifer (in his star making role) turn in complex credible performances but are easily outshone by the astonishingly strong acting out of Harvey Keitel, Delroy Lindo, Regina Taylor (who won awards for her work here), Keith David, and Lee regulars John Turturro and Thomas Byrd. Lindo is particularly impressive. This film may have been too gritty for general audiences with its brutal depiction of urban violence and emotional brutality. And it may have been a bit too stylized for the Saturday night drive-in set wanting a brainless shoot 'em up; but for those interested in quality film making on a hugely important issue that also functions as an engaging who done it, Spike Lee does it up royal in this, perhaps Lee's most, accessible film.

This movie is very misunderstood. I've heard people call it stereotypical, but this is only because they missed the obvious. The stereotypical aspect people see is all part of the story. The white police stereotypically harassing the street dealers is only stereotypical because society so commonly commits the very same actions. The movie is all about blame, who society blames, who society would like to blame, and sometimes whomever can be blamed. In actuality the movie has an extremely tense message about accepting ones own blame, while all throughout the movie blame is wrongly placed on nearly everyone. To avoid spoiling the movie I won't be overly specific but by the end of the movie Spike Lee had painted Injustice onto the screen.

I tend to enjoy films like Clockers; films that open up ideas about several things at once; films that make you think about the world in which they're set, the people in which inhabit them and the choices they must face – some of which are unfortunate through being mandatory. Spike Lee is no fool and a lot of his early work on recent viewings seem to revolve around someone stuck in a situation that is a mere result of their emotional drive and the world they are living in: She's Gotta Have it; Jungle Fever and Clockers are good examples of protagonists committing an action they really shouldn't have (and probably didn't want to but buckled under either temptation or peer pressure) and now must face the consequences. But these consequences will affect more than merely the hero.

Lee does not hang around in presenting or perhaps delivering his subject matter as a whole. The thing that amazes me with Lee is that he can write so many different types of characters: low grade African-Americans, educated and seemingly decent African-Americans; white cops; women of different ethnicity and a few others. In Clockers, the opening scene which integrates with the credits is of a somewhat crude and humiliating public autopsy during which a couple of white cops examine a dead black man in front of a watching black crowd. Two of these detectives are Rocco Klein (Keitel) and Larry Mazilli (Turturro) but the scene acts as one final act of humiliation to an already dead black man as they search his carcase for clues and bullet holes.

But the film has more than one current flowing throughout it. Strike (Phifer) plays a neighbourhood African-American who speaks and acts just like all his drug dealing friends, even hanging with them when they act out their drug selling routine to customers in a staged manner. But Strike is different and Lee wants us to create an alternate profile of the man by giving him milkshakes to drinks and trains to collect, set up in his apartment, maintain and run. The others laugh at this hobby but Strike maintains most of them too have hobbies: collecting welfare cheques. But this is the greatness of a character like Strike; we are led to believe he is a bad influence through the dialogue of a police man named Andre the Giant (David) but this is perhaps just another cop's point of view and opinion on another African American kid.

Andre believes Strike to be a bad influence on Tyrone (Love) but what Andre fails to notice is that there are higher, more criminal minds badly influencing Strike and that is more of a problem than Strike talking to Tyrone. The film is about a seemingly nice and somewhat moral 'gangstar' who is put in a situation where murder is the only way out, and we go through the narrative with the emphasis on this moral gangstar that he is actually a cold blooded killer in an excellent and very effective piece of atmosphere. But this is a slow burner and it slowly burns away at our opinion because there is a scene in Strike's apartment when he talks to Tyrone all about drugs and guns, apparently Tyrone should stay away from taking drugs but selling them will bring him a nice chunk of change; however guns are something that Tyrone should seriously consider getting into. To top this scene off, Tyrone is told that mathematics is also a very good thing. Already, Lee is trying to manipulate and force us to change out minds as to weather we like Strike. Is he a killer? Does he know drugs should be completely avoided? Why does he suggest Tyrone get a gun one day? Or is it just a misguided fool repeating what he once heard and saying what he thinks is right. Interesting how later on Tyrone repeats train information to another person after sort of adopting a 'Strike' figure.

But the film has some more strong points. Rodney Little (Lindo) thinks that just because he has had a shotgun in the mouth and was manipulated into murder, he can do it to others. Little himself asks Strike "How are you so smart and so stupid?" in a scene that actually has someone echo Strike's personality to his face. Little's background in presented in a nasty and somewhat disturbing fashion via flashback to the days when he was younger with Errol Barnes (Byrd), the resident 'hood psychopath-come-criminal who seems to have some distorted views to do with religion. With all this in the melting plot, it's no wonder the film does a good job in maintain interest and quality delivery. Lee does not fail to focus on his subject matter like he does in Summer of Sam when tackling the psychological development of a serial killer and a love triangle at the same time became messy. Instead, he does not get sidetracked with any unnecessary sub-plots and keeps the delivery sharp, realistic and intriguing when the final act comes to an end.