Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer (* * stars out of four, R, opens Friday in select cities) has the pace of a long, languid August day — until about 90 minutes in. Then, this formless drama, anchored by the powerful performance of Clarke Peters, goes from vague and meandering to incendiary. Set in Brooklyn, director Spike Lee’s latest film feels like several intriguing ideas in search of an over-arching story. It’s more of a rambling lecture on poverty, family and religion.
Bishop Enoch Rouse (Treme’s Peters) is a preacher at Li’l Piece of Heaven Baptist Church. His estranged daughter makes the trip from Atlanta to leave her 13-year-old son Flik (Jules Brown) to stay with him for the summer for reasons that are unclear.
A key revelation about the reverend’s character surfaces near the end and raises the question of whether his daughter knew the truth about her father. And if so, why would she leave her son with him?
Questions like these and the film’s murky thematic elements undercut the potency of the story. Lee can’t seem to decide whether he’s telling a coming of age saga, a character study or a larger denunciation of the hypocrisy and manipulation of the seemingly devout.
Lee makes a brief appearance as Mookie, the pizza deliveryman whom he played in 1989’s brilliant Do the Right Thing. That exhorting phrase also comes up several times in this film, so Lee is clearly making a link. But nobody seems to do the right thing in this drama.
While Peters is spellbinding in the complicated role of Enoch, Brown’s Flik is mostly sullen, which seems apropos for a middle-class teen transplanted against his will and made to clean his grandfather’s church. But he’s supposed to be impassioned about making documentaries on his iPad, and that doesn’t come across in his monotone performance. While Flik underplays his role, his bossy new friend Chazz (Toni Lysaith) overplays hers, and their bond doesn’t ring true…
Read more: USA Today
