"She Hate Me"

I have to admit to being moved by the end of "She Hate Me," which has the grace to allow for the possibility of change and growth in its characters and which suggests that human behavior is not always predictable and that life makes nonsense of exactly what it is we think we know. This is the section of the film most in tune with the inclusiveness that marked "25th Hour." But to get to it you have to wade through nearly two hours and 20 minutes of Lee fomenting divisiveness. And if critics aren't recognizing the contingencies and ambiguities of the end of "She Hate Me," it's because they've been paying attention all too well to what comes before.

Lee does damn near everything to cripple any sense of nuance. He has John spend most of the last scenes apologizing for his irresponsible behavior -- as if a man providing sexual services to adult, financially independent women who have paid for it is the same thing as a man indiscriminately impregnating any woman he can get into bed. He makes John out to be such a stud that one of his clients (Monica Bellucci) even feels the moment his sperm fertilizes her egg. He has John's ball-busting boss (Ellen Barkin) talk about how much she loved being pregnant, even the morning sickness.

Lee isn't a precise or disciplined enough artist to pull off the tone shift that would define the change in the way John views Fatima and Alex. He's content to let the audience laugh at John's perception of them as predatory dykes, and so he seems to be milking black homophobia as much as castigating it. Though Lee is finally compassionate toward Fatima and Alex, he's got too much macho in him for me to believe he'd be capable of showing as much compassion to gay black men.

And instead of John's losing his job being a mere pretext for the plot, Lee turns it into his comment on corporate corruption in the era of Enron and WorldCom. John blows the whistle on the dirty goings-on at his company and finds that he's suspected of wrongdoing by the SEC. His company somehow (it's never clear) gets the government to freeze his assets, and the organization's slimy chairman (Woody Harrelson) puts out the word that John is untrustworthy and can't be hired.

This is the preachy side of Lee -- and the kind that liberal audiences tend to swallow because they believe what he's saying without questioning the plausibility of what he's showing us. So the existence of corporate racism is used to justify the scene where Harrelson trumpets his hiring of people from the "darker nation." Does anyone believe an exec facing scrutiny from the SEC would risk talking like that? For that moment -- or a scene purporting to be a reelection ad for Bush -- to work, the tone of "She Hate Me" would have to be more wildly satirical than it is. But Lee, who always has an agenda, is fundamentally unsuited to satire, which has no sides, no friends, no agenda.

At times, "She Hate Me" feels like the clumsiest, most amateurish movie ever made by an acclaimed director. Matthew Libatique's cinematography looks almost purposefully ugly (especially the green-gray tones of the office scenes), the editing is rhythmless, the characters talk in topic sentences rather than to each other, and the repeated animated sequences of sperm bearing John's face are cheap looking and unfunny.

I wish I could say that the leaden, soapbox ranting of "She Hate Me" -- much of it delivered by actors staring right into the camera -- will put audiences off. But if "She Hate Me" comes a cropper at the box office, it won't be because of that. Along with "Fahrenheit 9/11" and Jonathan Demme's new remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," "She Hate Me" is part of the current group of political films that assume the audience is so stupid it has to be yelled at. Essentially, Michael Moore, Demme and Lee are no different from Ellen Barkin's scheming corporate exec, who says that the American people are so "fucking stupid" they'll believe what they're told.

There's a particularly depressing moment in Demme's slack, witless "Manchurian Candidate" when we see a newspaper headline that reads "Muslim Student Beaten to Death at Yale." Think about that. If Demme's point is that he fears for the safety of Muslims in America right now, then why not just "Muslim Student Beaten to Death"? The answer, I fear, is that Demme is implying this type of thing is what you'd expect in the Yahoo States of America under George W. Bush -- but if it happens at Yale, things must really be bad. It's an elitism I would never have expected of the man who made "Melvin and Howard" and "Something Wild." And it's an elitism that, in the political desperation people are feeling at the moment, seems to have become perfectly acceptable in the arts.

For a few years now, political pundits have been talking about how we can't gut our civil liberties in order to beat the terrorists. There's another danger afoot. It's time for critics to start speaking up against gutting our notions of good art in order to beat Bush.

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