"Bamboozled"

Spike Lee's explosive, near-masterpiece media satire balances between brilliance and incoherence.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Oct 6, 2000 | Why have just one moral when you can have two? Spike Lee has never been the subtlest of filmmakers, but "Bamboozled," like most of his work, virtually overflows with ideas, perhaps more of them than he can handle. As this explosive media satire -- certain to be one of the major talking points of the fall movie season -- draws to a close, TV writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) reflects on a quotation from James Baldwin: "People pay for what they do, and even more for what they have become." Then he remembers advice from his father, a former star comic now reduced to playing small clubs in black neighborhoods: "Always keep 'em laughing."

The story of Delacroix, an uptight buppie with a Harvard coffee mug and a dubious Francophone accent who creates a nightmarish blackface minstrel show for his fictional TV network, lies in the tension between those two potential epigraphs (or epitaphs, as the case may be). Anyone who thinks Lee is a dogmatic black racist won't be convinced by anything I have to say, and may as well turn off the computer and go back to the Wall Street Journal right now. Others will find "Bamboozled" to be a fascinating, enigmatic and, yes, shocking film, a near masterpiece ambiguously balanced between brilliance and incoherence.

On one hand, it's a furious protest against the persistent media stereotyping of blacks (or "Negroes," as the persnickety Delacroix always says) that has existed throughout American history. But Lee also suggests that blacks have become conscious and unconscious collaborators in the perpetuation of these stereotypes and must bear some responsibility for it. Delacroix's "New Millennium Minstrel Show" is sponsored by a malt liquor called Da Bomb (it comes in a bomb-shaped bottle with fins), whose commercial features a posse of writhing rappers urging viewers to "get your freak on."

Finally, although race is the proximate subject of "Bamboozled," its ultimate subject is the mass media as a soul-destroying force of corruption and conformity that turns all intentions, good and bad, toward its own ends. One can certainly argue that this view is overly simplistic -- contemporary television is a complicated and rapidly changing realm -- but the totality of Lee's scabrous vision here is marvelously executed. In fact, "Bamboozled" is finally a classic satirical broadside against anyone and everyone in the media, made partly in homage to Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" (Lee's dedication is to Budd Schulberg, the legendary screenwriter who wrote that film) and Sidney Lumet's "Network."

"Bamboozled" is entirely shot on digital video, and maybe that has some thematic resonance in a film about television. But I'm starting to feel that this new format is already a hackneyed device whose harsh shimmer and fuzzy edges are meant to convey authenticity. (Lee is now an old hand at DV, having used it for his hit concert film "The Original Kings of Comedy.") Cinematographer Ellen Kuras moves the ultralight cameras gracefully enough, and the colors are less pallid and peculiar than often happens on video. Still, when you can afford the honest-to-God crispness and luster of motion picture film, why settle for something that doesn't look quite as good?

I don't quite know how to feel about Wayans' performance. With his bespoke tailoring, Pilates classes and borderline-effeminate mannerisms, Delacroix at first seems to belong to a thin "In Living Color" sketch about a social-climbing black professional eager to forget his roots. After auditioning an angry, Afrocentric rap act called the Mau Maus for his variety show, he shudders and tells his assistant, Sloan (Jada Pinkett-Smith), in his fastidious, unplaceable English, "Frightening. I don't want anything to do with anything black for at least a week."

As gradually becomes clear, however, Delacroix's entire personality pretty much is a performance, constructed as much for his own benefit as for the outside world's. He's no more a real person than is the brand-name-obsessed serial killer of "American Psycho." I shouldn't give away too much of the story, so let's just say that Delacroix is a sort of self-invented Negro Gatsby who isn't really from Haiti or France or Quebec or West Africa. When he visits his father, Junebug (Paul Mooney), after the latter's nightclub performance, Junebug asks him, "Boy, where the fuck did you get that accent?"

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