Spike Lee Wraps History in Adventure in “Da 5 Bloods”

Alive to the needs of our time, and not content with giving us one film, Spike Lee, as generous as he is scathing, has two new works on release. The first, “3 Brothers,” lasts ninety-five seconds and comprises three pieces of footage, skillfully conjoined. Each piece shows the death of an African-American man at the hands of police. Two of the men, Eric Garner and George Floyd, are all too real, and the third, Radio Raheem, is a character in Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989). What the mini-movie demonstrates is not so much the coincidence of fact and fiction (each victim has the breath squeezed out of him) as the fulfillment of a prophecy. “I told you so,” Lee seems to say, in a rage of regret.

His second new film, “Da 5 Bloods,” is a little longer, at more than two and a half hours. It largely tells the story of four men: Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.). Years ago, they were comrades-in-arms, in the Vietnam War; now, as senior citizens, they are both more and less than friends, too tightly bound by everything that befell them to relax into mere companionship. So frequent are the gestures of togetherness, as the guys bump fists and pledge themselves to unity, that you wonder if they’re trying to prove something that they fear no longer holds fast.

We meet them as they gather, in the present day, at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. Their notional purpose is to find and to repatriate the remains of their platoon leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman), the fifth blood of the title, whom they revered, and who was killed in the wake of an encounter with the Vietcong. On the quiet, though, our heroes have an ulterior motive. “Our platoon was ordered to find a C-47 C.I.A. plane that went down with a payroll for the native people,” Otis explains. “Uncle Sam was paying them in gold bars, for their help against the VC. Well, we found the gold.” It was secreted there, awaiting retrieval at a later date. Thus, the veterans’ journey is both an act of homage and a search for buried treasure.

No surprise, perhaps, that the tone of “Da 5 Bloods” should career all over the place, from the solemn—listen to the soaring soundtrack, by Terence Blanchard—to the brutally hectic. Lee always likes to give us plenty of movie for our money, and the cornucopia, in this case, is stuffed to bursting point. Some of the stuffing is borrowed: the plot about wartime gold being shared among fellow-grunts is lifted from “Charade” (1963), if you please, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, while Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” which roared from loudspeakers mounted on helicopters in “Apocalypse Now” (1979), here accompanies the gentle chugging of a riverboat, as the gold hunters embark upon their quest. Eddie rightly scoffs at “those Hollyweird motherfuckers trying to go back and win the Vietnam War,” meaning Sylvester Stallone, in the second “Rambo” flick (1985), and the strangely smiling Chuck Norris, in “Missing in Action” (1984). Yet the climax of “Da 5 Bloods,” reluctant to shake old habits, pits a bunch of stranded Americans against gun-toting Vietnamese, amid ancient ruins. Looks pretty Hollyweird to me.

So, what else do we have? Tricky parental relations, for one thing: Otis discovers that he has a love child in Vietnam, while Paul is tracked down en route to the treasure by his son, David (Jonathan Majors), who is worried about his old man. Then come the French: the saintly Hedy Bouvier (Mélanie Thierry), who runs an outfit called lamb, or Love Against Mines and Bombs, and a white-suited sinner named Desroche (Jean Reno), who, to judge by the size of him, must be the chairman of loup, or Love of Unregistered Pâtisseries. To be honest, none of these subplots add much to the film’s essential force; as in “Miracle at St. Anna” (2008), Lee’s tale of African-American troops in Italy, set mostly in 1944, his footing becomes less sure when he strays from familiar ground.

On the other hand, because this is a Spike Lee enterprise, much of it does grip the gaze and summon up the blood. Now and then, the screen narrows; the fringes of the frame close inward like curtains being half drawn, as we turn back in time to the Vietnam War. We see Paul and his buddies in combat fatigues, fully armed, and, to our consternation, we realize that they are still being played by the same aging actors, with the same wrinkles and the same creaky knees. No prosthetics, no C.G.I. The effect is at once comical and oddly moving, a rebuff to the laborious digital youth that was applied to De Niro and his coevals in Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” last year. Lee is suggesting that these folks haven’t changed as they once hoped to do—that the shape of their adult existence was somehow formed and fixed by the traumas in Southeast Asia. And by the training, too; when a kid throws firecrackers in the street, in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City, the middle-aged Americans drop to the ground as if dodging tracer bullets.

In short, Lee’s new movie—like the great “BlacKkKlansman” (2018)—is a history lesson wrapped in an adventure, the caveat being that history is never done with us, and that we struggle to shrug it off our backs. In the throes of his feature films, Lee is never not a documentarian; he doesn’t hesitate to interrupt the flow of chatter with a still photograph of Milton L. Olive III, say, who fell on a grenade to save his comrades, in 1965, and was, we hear, “the first brother to be awarded the Medal of Honor in ’Nam.” But you don’t dishonor a sacrifice by asking what it was for. That’s why “Da 5 Bloods” kicks off with a clip of Muhammad Ali, denying that he has any quarrel with the Vietnamese, and moves on to Bobby Seale, from 1968, who declaims, “Here we go, with the damn Vietnam War, and we still ain’t gettin’ nothin’ but racist police brutality, etc.”

And there it is, deep in that “etc.” There’s the link between then and now. Why fight and die for your country, Lee implies, if your country will choke you anyway? When Paul and the gang go for gold, they aren’t raiding a lost ark; they are claiming reparation, for centuries of willful impoverishment. As Norman puts it, in a rousing flashback, “the U.S.A. owe us.” It’s a hell of an argument, and I wish I could feel it ring out across a crowded movie theatre; mind you, such are the social and political convulsions of recent weeks, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, in Minneapolis, that it’s easy to imagine viewers watching “Da 5 Bloods” online and being swayed, even at home, by the surge of its indignation.

It seems wholly fitting that, where “BlacKkKlansman,” a more focussed film, was calmed by the central presence of John David Washington, as an unflappable cop, the core of the new movie should belong to Delroy Lindo, as Paul—wrathful, tearful, and barely in control. He’s a Trump voter, in a maga cap; he’s a mess, who ends up addressing the camera, like the witness to a natural disaster; and he breaks your heart. I won’t forget the sight of him as he marches off into the jungle by himself, shouting the Twenty-third Psalm as if issuing a command. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” he cries, biting hard on the final “t.” So much for green pastures. He went to war, the poor soul, and never came back.

The weight of the past presses down, in a very different way, on Judd Apatow’s “The King of Staten Island.” The movie is about the gangling Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson), who is twenty-four, lives with his mother, and has vague plans to be a tattoo artist. His sister, Claire (Maude Apatow), is off to college, leaving Scott to hang out with his errant friends. He has sex with Kelsey (Bel Powley), but any satisfaction is muffled by the antidepressants he takes. “There’s something wrong with me up there,” he tells her, indicating his head, and there’s no hiding the root of the wrongness: his father, a firefighter, died seventeen years earlier, in heroic circumstances. No wonder Scott looks and behaves like an overgrown kid. His life is in embers.

Fans of “Saturday Night Live,” having followed Davidson’s rise to fame, will know how closely—indeed alarmingly—he is being used here as a template for Scott. Both have mental-health problems; both have Crohn’s disease; and both employ comedy not to deflect from their adversities but to tunnel into them. (One major change: Davidson’s father, also a fireman, perished on 9/11.) If you have a taste for this near-reckless candor, and for the snarls of pride with which Scott defends his slackerdom, you will relish this movie, at least in its early phase. The later stages, be warned, contain scenes of emotional uplift, in which Scott gets a dose of male bonding at the local firehouse. He becomes a dogsbody, and learns how to fold the American flag. So that’s how you cure depression.

By the end, in truth, I found myself swamped by Scott, and wondered if he might have made more impact as a secondary character—maybe as a foil to his widowed mother, Margie, who is played to perfection by Marisa Tomei. Not since Barbara Stanwyck has an actress blended zest and pathos into such expressive chords. Margie, eager to support her son, sports one of his tattoos on her arm. “Is that a cocker spaniel?” she is asked. “No,” she replies. “That’s my daughter, Claire.”