Chi-Raq is a didactic satirical modern hip-hop musical comedy drama about inner city violence based on an Ancient Greek play. Much like that sentence, Spike Lee’s new joint never coheres into a singular whole. In the vein of an overly-ambitious student film, Chi-Raq is as vital and successful as it is messy and incoherent. Chi-Raq is part of the grand tradition of admirable fiascos mades by filmmakers too angry to figure out what they want to say nevertheless how they want to say it.
Spike’s new joint is based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, a satire where women, tired of the Peloponnesian War, band together and withhold all sex until their husbands discover peace. Spike transposes Lysistrata from Greece to Chicago, and the Peloponnesian War becomes a gang war. Spike’s Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is dating the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) who leads the Purple Gang. The Purple Gang is warring with the Orange Gang, lead by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes?!), who shoot up the nightclub where Chi-Raq is performing. After a young girl is murdered by a stray bullet from a drive-by, Lysistrata gathers up a coalition of the women, on both sides of the war, to withhold sex until there is peace in the streets.
Some of the problems with Chi-Raq stem from its origins, ambitions, and rarity. Looking out over recent cinema, there hasn’t been a high-profile film in recent times that even begins to address the problem of inner city violence in America. Most of the films that have are generally straight-to-video morality tales. By being about a touchy subject that’s rarely touched upon, Chi-Raq has the power of a bomb just by its mere existence.
The usual method of satire for Spike Lee is to mock its subjects, even as it is pointing out the world’s foibles. In the past, this has never worked to Spike Lee’s favor. Spike’s most vicious media satire, Bamboozled, was hobbled by his didactic “this is the history of media racism in this country” followed by a soft ending to a brutal movie. Even if some of us think that Spike is a little too exacting in spelling out exactly what it is he’s saying, he has good cause to. Do the Right Thing had an ending that completely baffled large swathes of audiences who otherwise admired the film itself. Spike is well known for saying that only white critics have asked if Mookie did the right thing, and, since white critics control the critic world, Spike spells everything out for them so that there are absolutely no misunderstandings.
Chi-Raq suffers from a conflict of message because Lysistrata isn’t a subtle play. It steamrolls conflict into a matter of ego and urges. Men fight because men are men. Men and women lust because people are people. Women have power because they control the pussy. Hell, this idea has come up even in modern feminism. I’ve read op-eds saying, “If your boyfriend doesn’t support abortion or birth control, don’t fuck him.” Hell, John Waters has even semi-joked, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have any books on their shelves, don’t fuck them.” In a sense, all the men in Chi-Raq are reduced to egomaniacal killing fuck machines who bring home the dough. The women are, similarly, either mothers or fuck machines. The nuance that Lee brought to Bamboozled (or even School Daze) is almost completely absent in Chi-Raq, to make room for the satirical adaptation and the blunt dialogue completely delivered in sing-song verse (sometimes, so terrible that Shakespeare would weep).
There are two exceptions: Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), a wise older woman who came from the infamous Cabrini Green and spends her time reading books (including novels by Gore Vidal), and Father Mike Corridan (John Cusack), a white Roman-Catholic pastor who provides a leadership role model in the black community. These two voices provide Chi-Raq with its requisite Spike Lee didactic speeches. Miss Helen preaches against the ways of the young, and how they’ve corrupted the ideologies gangs of yore (which, in her case, was 1995). Yet, she never mentions how those gangs were, themselves, a perversion of the community groups from the 60s, like the Black Panthers who ran beneficial programs like free breakfasts for school children. Still, Miss Helen preaches the facts of economic disparity and the defining disparities of a ghetto. Mike Corridan presents the link to the other, whiter and more affluent, world. Corridan, based on renowned anti-violence advocate Michael Pfleger, preaches his own brand of peace from the pulpit. The scenes with both these characters stop Chi-Raq‘s descent into Grecian wackiness, presenting a version of Lee’s informational voice accompanied by Lee’s trademark Solemn Music (it’s about as expected as The Conclusion Music in any given episode of Full House).
There’s actually a third voice of sanity, Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson), Lee’s Greek Chorus. Unlike Miss Helen and Mike Corridan, Dolmedes is frequently caught up in the drama, and brings his own brand of lunacy into the mix. For all the deliciousness of Jackson as a wicked and mischievous Greek Chorus, a role he was born to play, Jackson is the most hobbled by Lee’s terrible couplets. Jackson can’t go on his usual rantings without diving into a sing-song pattern that breaks up his usual speech patterns.
Lee announces his stylistic intentions up front, when he forces the viewer to listen to the full length of Nick Cannon’s rap song Chi-Raq while writing out every lyric in red to make sure you understand exactly what is being sung. Probably intended as a throw back to the opening of Do the Right Thing, the problem is that Chi-Raq is no Fight the Power, Nick Cannon is no Chuck D, and there is no Rosie Perez to really hit it home. For the first 20 minutes, it seems that Spike Lee is in “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” mode. Lee first does that lyric thing, then runs through statistics about violence, then has an audio recording from Michael Pfleger, and then, when we meet Chi-Raq, has a rap song with the important lyrics posted on the screen in text message blocks.
By the end of Chi-Raq, Lee is throwing the audience nauseating tonal shift after nauseating tonal shift. One part of the story is a loony sex cartoon with scantily clad women in chastity belts with padlocks dangling from their crotches. Another part is a preachy and didactic Very Serious Movie about street violence. Another is a tragic drama about a young girl shot and murdered by a stray bullet in a drive-by, and her mother’s search for answers. They’re all colliding against each other, with no rhyme or reason, and they feel like they have nothing to do with each other except that they all have everything to do with each other. Lee has absolutely no sense of control in this movie, and it feels as cynical as it does angry.
Though Lee’s visual sense has never been better, Chi-Raq is a movie off the fucking rails. It’s vital. It’s problematic. It’s hilarious. It’s obvious. It’s reductive. Chi-Raq is, essentially, an old man yelling at the youth to get off his lawn and stop shooting his neighborhood. Unlike John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (celebrating 25 years in 2016), Lee has few answers. He knows the causes, but cannot integrate them in reality. He knows the symptoms, even citing the Black Lives Matter movement as a symptom of the constant oppression of the impoverished. But, he can’t figure out a real answer. And, for a movie that exclaims “This is an emergency” and has a rather hopeful ending, that’s a major problem.