How America's foremost
black filmmaker lost his touch

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"Girl 6"
Directed by Spike Lee
Starring Theresa Randle, Isaiah Washington and Spike Lee
Fox Searchlight Pictures

By LAURA MILLER

Being black has been both the best and the worst thing to happen to Spike Lee as a filmmaker. He's a born ensemble director capable of making movies packed with broadly drawn characters, juicy colors, sly jokes and even the occasional musical extravaganza (of which he is completely -- and for a contemporary director, remarkably -- unafraid). At his best, he peoples the screen with men and women holding fierce and incompatible opinions, all talking more or less at once, along the lines of Stephen Frears' exhilarating "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" and "My Beautiful Laundrette." The first half of "Do the Right Thing" is a great neighborhood movie -- fast, funny and cacophonous, high on the opportunity to capture the flavor of black social life at last, a milieu ripe with untapped material.

If advocates for multiculturalism truly wanted diversity, Spike would be their man. He likes to mix it up, toss a dozen multicolored notions into the air and let us sort it out for ourselves. He's too protean to hold deep convictions, but he's got a healthy sense of fun.

But Lee had the misfortune to be the most prominent black director of his time and wound up charged with an array of "responsibilities" to which he is unequal. As the Anointed Spokesperson of African-American culture in the late '80s, Lee allowed himself to be bullied into acting as the champion of a restrictive ideology that drained him of his eclectic impishness. He became a tiresome, hectoring public figure, striking self-righteous poses and churning out the turgid hagiography of "Malcolm X" (although he did slip in that giddy zoot suit production number). By nature, he sympathizes a little bit with everyone and therefore avoids moralizing -- just about the worst profile for a propagandist. Assuming that mantle only brought out the worst side of his cartoonish sensibility.

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Next page: Signs of a broken spirit