Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
In the summer of 1976, just about the time New York was winding down from the Bicentennial extravaganza, I was moving from New York after two wonderful years. That July, there was a murder, just another murder, which turned out to be the first in a series of killings that lasted a year, until David Berkowitz, "the Son Of Sam," was apprehended in the summer of 1977.
In case you haven’t heard, Spike Lee’s new film, Summer of Sam is not about the serial killer. Instead, it is about a community, in fact, several communities terrorized by a serial killer. Although I left New York many years ago, I still love that dirty, crowded, uncomfortable old city, and I will watch films set in New York just for the settings. From the impossibly romantic Upper West Side of You’ve Got Mail to the all too possibly gritty, grungy Bronx of Summer of Sam, New York is an incredibly photogenic city, always ready for its next close up.
This close-up is a special treat, as director Spike Lee, focuses on a small, isolated Italian-American neighborhood. This small community reflects the larger community of all five boroughs of New York—a fact emphasized by occasional television broadcasts with director Lee playing a newsman. There is a special quality to the heat in New York, a heat which took even this native southerner by surprise. "Hot time, trouble in the city," as the song goes. Lee catches the texture of heat, hate, suspicion, intolerance, and fear that percolate almost any summer night in New York and that boil over in a blackout during a madman’s siege of the city.
The late seventies were a strange time in the life of a strange city, and Lee re-creates the clothes, music, sports, and cars of the time. The extremes of the brotherhood of Italian neighborhood pals range from CBGB’s, the mecca of punk rockers, to Studio 54, the disco paradise, with an abrupt stop off at Plato’s Retreat, the anything-goes pre-AIDS fantasy dome with orgy of the night. Lee’s hungry camera gobbles it all up with hardly a pause to chew.
Stuck around the far corners of the outer boroughs, there are many neighborhoods like Layton Avenue, which seems like a small Italian village transported to the brave new world. Men in their late twenties, torn by economic uncertainty, testosterone and Catholic guilt, stand around with nothing to do, peddling illicit substances, cheating on their wives, and bursting out in violence and obscenity. Lee captures the neighborhood by mixing several stories that have the same setting and the same characters.
John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino play a young couple, Vinny and Dionna, for whom the tension and suspicion of the summer of Sam parallel the tensions and suspicions in their marriage. Like most of the characters in this ensemble piece, Vinny and Dionna never come to life. Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino will not be walking up the aisle at this year’s presentation. There is nothing for her to do but stand around watching her talents go to waste. Leguizamo, who has built up an impressive background in comedy, has nothing much to work with either. In fact, the one moment in the film that brought a lot of laughs from the audience was a ludicrous bare-bottom sex scene that I don’t think was intended to be funny.
Adrien Brody fares better as Ritchie, whose old neighborhood buddies suspect of being the killer. It is a trademark of Lee’s films that he uses music for thematic and dramatic effect. The surprise is that he fares as well here with punk music and its ancestors (the Who) as he has previously with black music. Brody is an old-timer in the neighborhood, who stretches the bounds of acceptance when he returns at the beginning of the film with spiked hair, equally bizarre clothes, and a British accent as phony as most of filmdom’s southern accents. His punk music is just one element in the case against him as the serial killer. When his old pals learn that he has supported himself by dancing nude and making pornographic movies, there are no doubts in their minds… or rather, in their collective mind.
One of the most memorable strands of this sprawling tapestry of film is the mob subplot. The police turn to local mob chieftan Luigi (Ben Gazzara) for help in capturing the killer, much as the Berlin police turned to the underworld for help in the greatest of films about a serial killer, Fritz Lang’s M (1931).
David Berkowitz is portrayed on screen only for a very few minutes. There is no glorification of the sicko here. Michael Badlucco plays the killer with all stops out. His performance is so frenzied, out of control, that in one of the film’s worst missteps, when the dog that Berkowitz alleged spoke to him actually speaks, the audience howled. Badalucco needed no such back up. Intriguingly, he appeared in last year’s New York fairy tale, You’ve Got Mail. Maybe he has a New York kind of face.
Often in films, more is not more. This particular Summer of Sam would have been much better if it had ended sometime in late July and hadn’t stretched on to Labor Day. This is an old complaint about Lee. Much of the tension and energy of the film is watered down. At less than two hours, this could have been one of the great films of the decade. As it is, Summer of Sam stands as a sprawling mess with flashes of greatness bubbling to the top.
I very much appreciate this film, but there are elements of it that I do not appreciate. You should be warned that it is extremely violent, gory, and I have to say unnecessarily obscene. OK, we’re talking New Yorkers under pressure (when aren’t they?) in the summer, but if the repetitions of a certain notorious four letter word were just cut by half, the film would not have lost anything in verisimilitude. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I find the bad taste more of a problem than the obscenity.
Jimmy Breslin, the quintessential New York journalist, who received some letters from Berkowitz, appears at the beginning and end of the film as himself to give the film a historical perspective and distance, even, one might say, a bit of class. Oh, well, join me in keeping your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts, no matter the language or the city.
New York has long been a star in its own mind. Check out "The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906" at:
http://learning.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/nyfilm/nyintro.html
"The Unofficial Spike Lee Web Joint" is currently under construction at:
http://thunder.ocis.temple.edu/ jstewart/spike_lee/40acres.html