When it was first announced that Spike Lee would turn his camera to the blood soaked streets of Chicago from his usual landscape of New York City, we were filled with joy. The man who can capture that pains of a city better than anyone was tackling the gun violence problem in the Windy City. Given that gun related deaths in Chicago in the last few years have surpassed those who perished in the Iraq war, the city took on a new and much more notorious name that is also the title of Lee’s latest joint, Chi-Raq.
Lee chose an interesting means with which to tell his tale of Chicago gun violence and its incredible cost that is robbing generations of a future and so many of hope. He chose to model his story after the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes and make it a satire. His characters speak in rhyme (most of the time) and the feel of the film is sadly never as serious as the problems it reflects call for. It is an enormous missed opportunity by the powerful and legendary filmmaker to make a statement to a city so in need of an uplifting piece of art that also might provide answers to questions decades in the making.
A satire? At this point, the situation in Chicago is so grave that there is no world in which this issue needs levity. We are supremely disappointed and frankly upset and insulted at the means with which a filmmaker we wholeheartedly adore and respect chose to tell this story of a problem that could not be more serious in America. What is happening in Chicago is also a mirror to what is happening on a larger scale in America. It is exponentially worse in the Illinois city, but what a huge potential artistic moment for a filmmaker to craft a film that makes us think and hopefully, moves people to action.
Instead, we got Chi-Raq.
Nick Cannon portrays a gang leader and aspiring hip hop artist who shares a name with the movie. The film begins with him rapping about his city and embracing its woes, while simultaneously taking responsibility for being a part of it. There’s potential here. This is a poet-killer who is putting all his cards on the table. He does what he does and he knows not what is wrong with it. He’s dating Teyonah Parris’ Lysistrata and she, at first, is attracted to his thug way of life. But, when Irene’s (Jennifer Hudson) young girl is killed by a stray bullet, Lysistrata begins to see the light. She moves out on Chi-Raq and relocates to her aunt Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), who begins to fill her head with the idea that she and other women like her have the power to end this violence.
How? By denying sex to their men. Yup, Chi-Raq devolves into a story about how the solution to gun violence in Chicago (and America for that matter) is for all woman to say, “No peace, no piece.” (Yes, that’s the film’s tagline.)
Lee and his filmmaking team frame it by citing the example of how a sex strike helped end the civil war in Liberia (with Leymah Gbowee leading the way). But in the way that it is shown in Chi-Raq, it comes off as the satire that Lee sought to make and yet again, that forum does not work for such a “movement.” We also find it insulting to women and men that we are such primal creatures that we are so ruled by our sexual urges that the mere removal of sex from our lives could force change.
These issues are a million times more complicated than that. It is a simplistic, and again insulting, means to end gun violence. You mean to tell me that Lee believes the only way that woman can end violence in her community is to withhold access to their bodies? Please! They have minds that can persuade. They have opinions that can mold others. Withholding sex is not the only way to end a violent strife of a community! Yet, in Lee’s Chi-Raq, that is the only solution he presents that will bring this problem to a head that can be solved.
It is a shame. Lee had and has the support of the community of Chicago where these victims are buried by the dozen every day. Those final shots of the film where mothers are holding photos of children… those are real life mothers holding photos of their gone-too-soon children. Lee’s latest is not only a missed opportunity, it’s a shameful waste of an attempt to put a spotlight on an issue that so sorely needs one as bright as they come.
Grade: D