Spike Lee's Inside Scoop

It’s amazing how Spike Lee manages to take what is superficially just a nicely tangled heist film and use it as a wireframe around which to flesh out all of his major obsessions. The vagaries of racial conflict, the afro-centric view of New York, the post September 11^th tensions of his favorite city, cultural stereotyping and its influence on youth, racial sins of the past brought to bear on the present, the carnally sexual view of love—in Inside Man, it’s all there in brilliant Spike Lee form. And yet it never feels pushy or dogmatic in the way we’ve come to expect from anything labeled “A Spike Lee Joint.” No, Inside Man is smart, slick, patient, and unexpectedly clever—it’s the most genial hostage picture I’ve ever seen.

As with 25^th Hour, which has been sadly absent from major cultural discussion over the past few years, Lee has made a rare film that keeps in mind how September 11^th changed everything without actually making an overt “September 11^th movie.” Perhaps what both 25^th hour and Inisde Man show is that Lee works best when applying his particular obsessions to a more conventional framework. Instead of making his recurrent motifs his foundation, and thus having to laboriously weave them together into intriguing but generally awful dreck like She Hate Me, he is released of the burden of supporting his movie on his own ideas and thus is able to play with them in much lighter, more palatable fashion.

Of course, Lee is aided by a cast that, for once, deserves the critically overused adjective “stellar.” The leads, Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jody Foster, are as brilliant as one might expect, especially Foster as a coolly vicious fixer—a steely, feminized version of Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction. But the real strength is in the supporting cast: Willem Dafoe, playing a more serious version of the grumbling dimwit he gave us in The Life Aquatic; Christopher Plummer (remember him as Shakespeare-quoting Klingon general with a nailed-on eye patch in Star Trek VI?), whose regale, refined surface gives way to expose the fragility of power; Chiwetal Ejiofor, the one saving grace of Melinda and Melinda and a haunting conscience in Dirty Pretty Things, is endlessly watchable, one of the few actors who can stand out while playing second fiddle to Denzel Washington. Inside Man may be both a heist flick and a Spike Lee joint, but it’s the actors that steal the show.

With a sharp, often-funny script and a great cast, Lee is free to toy with his favorite filmmaking vices, especially color and sound. Although no scene approaches the grandeur of the best sequences of Malcolm X, or even the moments of orchestrated wonder that dotted He Got Game and 25^th Hour, Lee still makes time for to show off his beloved home city with vivid colors and moody music. Here, he employs a jaunty, jazz-inflected score (with shades of both Bernard Herrmann and Howard Shore) that balances between the playful tone of the detective banter with the more intense moments of hostage crisis.

Surprising, nimble, elegant and lively, Inside Man’s only real flaw might be being too smart for its own good. The resolution lacks the punch the buildup implies, and a few of the narrative turns don’t quite stand up to post-viewing scrutiny. But in a filmmaking environment where thrillers are typically little more than vehicles for sadism and Dolby-jolt scares, these are hardly major complaints. Who ever thought that Spike Lee would make a movie I could accurately describe as nifty?