August 19-25, 2004

movies

Scattershot

TWO OUT OF THREE: Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie as She Hate Me's ex-couple. Not pictured: her girlfriend.

She Hate Me is most interesting when it makes the least sense.

by Sam Adams

She Hate Me opens with a bravura credit sequence that perfectly sets the tone for what's to come. As Terence Blanchard's characteristically swollen score rises, the screen fills with portraits of famous Americans: Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Washington. Their faces on our currency are meant to instill a sense of trust, but as Spike Lee's camera caresses the bills, they begin to ripple, as if buffeted by a strong wind, suggesting both the country's current crisis of responsibility and the extent to which money, and not the flag, is the authority to which we pledge allegiance. And then, riding high on the crest of his own argument, Lee mints a brand-new bill, the U.S. seal replaced with the Enron logo, George W. Bush's jug-eared face smiling serenely in its center.

Bush the younger's corporate coziness is fair game, of course, but in putting Bush's face on the three-dollar bill, Lee is edging close to a more underhanded slight: calling the president a queer.

Unfortunately, that brief moment is the only time She Hate Me's twin themes of politics and sexuality overlap, despite some swift sleight-of-hand by Lee and his co-screenwriter Michael Genet. Sure, if he hadn't blown the whistle on phony research at his day job, John Henry Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) wouldn't be desperate for money, and if he weren't hard up for cash, he'd never allow his ex-girlfriend-turned-lesbian Fatima (Kerry Washington) to sell his sperm for $10,000 a pop to Sapphic sisters who want to get pregnant the old-fashioned way. Why, exactly? She Hate Me serves up a few rationales, from STDs to the genetic crap-shoot of sperm bank donors. But really, it's because Lee likes the idea of John Henry putting wood to all those lesbians. She Hate Me is full of ideas Lee likes, but no matter how deftly Lee toggles between them, the whole mess never congeals. He's cooking, but without enough heat.

In his well-appointed Buppie flat, John Henry, whose name already conflates two African-American heroes, is surrounded by portraits of great figures in black sports history, an answer to the credits montage: Joe Louis jabs toward the viewer, while Jackie Robinson arcs one into the stands. (Driving the point home, his father is played by Jim Brown.) But where's the model for today's black professional? Or anyone else, for that matter? In one of the movie's many questionable digressions, John Turturro plays a Godfather-quoting Mafia don, clinging to romantic depictions of the Old World rather than confronting the new — i.e., the fact the daughter Monica Bellucci is a lesbian, and the long-hoped-for child she's about to bear is half-black. Though John Henry gets some advice from a guilt-ridden co-worker (The Tin Drum's David Bennent) before said co-worker throws himself out of the window (crushing a coffee-cart vendor; no innocent bystanders here), J.H. is on his own when his diabolical bosses (Woody Harrelson, Ellen Barkin in a Martha Stewart 'do) throw him to the SEC wolves. Assets frozen, masculine pride in shreds, he's sunk as low as he can go. That is, until his ex shows up at his door with her smoking new girlfriend (Dania Ramirez) and suggests that he knock them both up.

John Henry demurs, at first, but the money proves too good to refuse, and soon he's banging them by the dozen, as many as Fatima can squeeze into a night. Luckily for our man Jack, they're lookers, every one, and despite their varying shades of hostility towards the un-fair sex, there doesn't seem to be a dyke alive this manly man can't turn straight, at least for a few minutes.

It's an outrageous, not to say idiotic, suggestion, but if you're still expecting Spike Lee to rally round the gay agenda, you haven't seen his last, oh, 14 movies. She Hate Me is an incoherent and often ridiculous movie, but it has the feeling of a director genuinely trying to work something out on screen, and so remains interesting even after it's stopped making sense. Thanks mainly to Kerry Washington's steely-soft performance, Fatima is the most complex, fascinating female in any of Lee's films (even if that's a severely handicapped category), and though it won't win Lee any GLAAD awards, the fully clothed sex scene between Washington and Ramirez isn't played for voyeuristic thrills. The movie's final embrace of nontraditional family structures doesn't ring entirely true, but it's undoubtedly sincere.

These days, Lee is best when he doesn't quite know what he wants to say. Better She Hate Me's rambling than Bamboozled's paper-thin polemics. Sometimes Lee's insistence on approaching salient issues from the back seems merely perverse: If John Henry's situation is meant to comment on baby-father abandonment, then why focus on a man whose fatherhood is denied by contract? Lee's omnivorous approach guarantees a surfeit of interpretations, all unsatisfying, which might be what's led early reviewers to revive the perennial charges of Lee's misogyny and homophobia — those strands, at least, are easily extracted from the movie's tangled skein. But if Lee has always vehemently refused to admit any such thing (see sidebar), She Hate Me feels like a tacit admission of guilt, and a tentative olive branch — while being, at the same time, a none-too-subtle fuck-you to the positive-image police. Even Lee's ambivalence is emphatic.

She Hate Me Directed by Spike Lee A Sony Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Five