Site Presented By
Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Despite its predatory lesbians and randy studs, Spike Lee's latest effort isn't homophobic. But that doesn't mean it's good.
Jul 30, 2004 | For a sex farce to be any good, it has to risk offending somebody. And since there are a lot of people who can't loosen up enough to laugh at the idea that what turns us on may upset our most deeply held notions of who we are, it's often not hard to offend people.
With "She Hate Me" (lousy title) Spike Lee, who co-wrote the movie with Michael Genet, has a good, potentially inflammatory comic idea. John (Anthony Mackie) is a successful young black executive who loses his job and makes ends meet by becoming a stud to prosperous lesbians who want to get pregnant -- at $10,000 a pop. He gets started when Fatima (the luminous Kerry Washington, who deserves better), the ex-fiancée John found in bed with another woman, turns up at his apartment wanting to get both herself and her lover, Alex (Dania Ramirez), pregnant, and offers to pay John for his services. Sensing a great business opportunity, Fatima becomes John's pimp, trumpeting his abilities to her "glam dyke" friends and taking a 10 percent cut. Soon the Sapphic elite are lining up at John's plush apartment and leaving happily, as the Brits say, up the spout.
The problem with "She Hate Me" is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce. The idea of directing with a glancing touch is alien to him. He wants to score points -- and if he has to slug you to do it, he will. Lee seemed to be moving beyond that in his last picture, "25th Hour," a near-great American movie. In "She Hate Me," he's back to his ham-fisted, insensitive style. I don't agree with the advance reviews that have labeled the movie homophobic, but it's easy to see why some critics have misread "She Hate Me" as saying that all lesbians, no matter what they claim, are really hungry for dick.
Certainly, Lee does what he can to make lesbians appear predatory. When Fatima and Alex first turn up at John's digs, they fondle and leer at each other on his expensive sofa as if they were prepping for a scene in one of Andrew Blake's designer pornos. When Alex brings her first batch of prospective customers over to John's apartment, they check him out like the crass, boorish young execs you sometimes see at strip clubs. This role reversal isn't played for laughs (the way it is when women leer at a solitary man on the subway in Bertrand Blier's "Femmes Fatales"). You feel that Spike Lee resents seeing a man in a position usually reserved for women.
"She Hate Me"
Directed by Spike Lee
Starring Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington
It should be funny when John's customers are happily bouncing their way toward orgasm and mommyhood, but Lee directs the scenes as if the women's sexual happiness were a foregone conclusion. Lee doesn't allow them to show surprise at their pleasure because he's not surprised by it. (It doesn't help that Terence Blanchard's make-out mood music is slathered over the soundtrack.) And showing John popping Viagra and quaffing Red Bull to service the four of five women Fatima brings him each night reinforces the image of the evil lesbos draining the man of his juices.
