I tried to give Spike Lee’s new movie Highest 2 Lowest every possible chance to have a powerful impact — so much so that I deliberately avoided rewatching the source material, Akira Kurosawa’s landmark 1963 film, High and Low, itself based on an Ed McBain novel. I haven’t seen it in decades, though I still vividly remember Toshirō Mifune’s powerhouse performance as well as just how seriously the film took the class stratification at the heart of its story.
But I needn’t have bothered. Highest 2 Lowest, which is getting a lot of critical praise even though it’s tanking at the box office, is a real mess. It’s full of strange choices that pull the audience’s attention all over the place, along with an overarching sensibility of Boomer nostalgia for supposedly better times that’s pretty shocking.
When it comes to the strange choices, look no further than the opening scene featuring a classic showtune from Oklahoma! (“Oh What a Beautiful Morning”) sung with manly brio over impossibly glossy shots of New York City. All that rural imagery called up by the cowboy singer is matched to oddly empty but soaring shots of cement-and-steel canyons and skyscrapers and lofty penthouses. At the song’s crescendo, we meet music mogul David King (Denzel Washington), who is on the phone trying to make a deal while gazing out from the loftiest penthouse of them all.
You’re left thinking, well, that peculiar song choice has gotta be satirizing something? Maybe Lee’s mocking the corny camp qualities its accumulated over almost eighty years as a contrapuntal force against clashing urban imagery and a depiction of contemporary creative life in black America? But apparently not. Nothing else ever happens in the film to develop anything significant about that peculiar choice. It just happens to be a nice morning in New York City, and David King is a powerful figure in this world. That’s it.
King, on this particular morning, isn’t even notably happy in his world. He’s facing many obstacles in his high-risk endeavor to use all this personal wealth to buy back control of his company, Stackin’ Hits Records. Concerned at the soulless, all-business, AI-friendly direction the music industry has taken, he wants to return to the emphasis on discovering bold, young musical talent that made him successful in the first place.
With King’s fortune on the line, this precarious deal goes scarily awry when it seems his teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped. And paying the ransom will break him — or at least, prevent him from taking back control of Stackin’ Hits Records. It seems he could still take the fallback deal he’d been trying to avoid, a very lucrative buyout that would make him even richer but would mean the loss of the company he built.
Then it turns out that the kidnapper made a mistake and snatched the son of King’s driver, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), instead. Nevertheless, the ransom demand remains the same. The great moral dilemma of the film is: Will King give up his ownership in the company he created, denting his grand status in the world, for the sake of his employee’s son? Lee has weighted the choice heavily on the side of paying, because Paul Christopher is King’s close friend whom he rescued from a far rougher life as a struggling ex-con.
This central friendship is something screenwriter Alan Fox added while updating the cool, complex, black-and-white world of the original Kurosawa film, and it’s perhaps an example of what Spike Lee called their adaptation process: “We had to put some hot sauce on it.”
In 1963’s High and Low, the mogul and the chauffeur are certainly not friends, though their sons — much younger boys than the teenagers who’ve been raised together in Lee’s version — are playmates. The strict, and very Japanese, hierarchical division between employer and employee in the original film makes the situation much starker and more agonizing in class terms, with every deferential bow from the grief-stricken chauffeur reinforcing the great socioeconomic distance between him and his boss. The whole film emphasizes the way society has created and constantly reinforces a virtually impassable abyss between worker and boss.
And it’s made clear in the original that if Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) pays the ransom, he really will lose everything — all his wealth and social status, his hilltop mansion and expensive possessions, because he’s had to put everything on the line — as well as borrow immense amounts of money — in order to make the attempt at a company takeover.
So the viewer feels the whole lead-weight rationale of his (likely) refusal to sacrifice himself and his family for an employee’s son. It’s a terrible thing to understand this position, to realize the extent to which we’re all made to see the world in terms of upper-class values and concerns. It seems like practically a miracle to everyone else in the film when pleas and persuasion from the chauffeur and Gondo’s wife, as well as a betrayal by his closest associate at work, actually convince him to pay the ransom, with his financial ruin as the inevitable consequence.
But in Highest 2 Lowest, Lee’s “hot sauce” strategy backfires because it’s clear from the beginning that King must pay the ransom. It’s not just his chauffeur’s son, it’s his old friend’s son. In Lee’s film, it makes King seem like a monster that he even hesitates, for quite a long while, especially because we learn he can still opt for the lucrative buyout. The stark moral choice of High and Low gets so muddled in Highest 2 Lowest it becomes merely confusing.
David and Pam King (Ilfenesh Hadera) huddle in their garishly opulent pad to discuss whether they should actually put their wealth on the line for the son of their old friend, instead of quite possibly letting the kid be murdered by his abductor. They even consider solemnly what social media has to say about it. Will everyone vilify them if they endanger the life of their friend’s son, or even let him die? But on the other hand, what if the story only goes viral for a few days, and then some other news takes over, in which case it’d all blow over?
Presumably we’re supposed to hate these people even if the ransom does get paid. But no — that’s not how it goes. The film wants us to come around when King finally agrees to pay, after many assurances from the cops that they’ll retrieve the money. We’re apparently supposed to cheer and regard King as a hero by the end. It’s weird.
The strangest change made by screenwriter Alan Fox to the Kurosawa film is removing perhaps the most unforgettable aspect of the source material — the mid-narrative shifts of the film’s point of view, from the “high” of the rich mogul’s story, to the “low” of the poor young kidnapper. In the Kurosawa film, there are disconcertingly smooth camera moves that simply switch from following the cops hunting in overcrowded slums for the kidnapper, to following the kidnapper.
The impoverished young man has lived his entire life in the sweltering flatlands under the literal shadow of the mogul’s cool, spacious hilltop home. And he wants someone to pay for the life of systemic suffering that’s been imposed on himself and his family and community. The mogul living in luxury directly above him becomes the natural target.
The daring and the dignity of that structure! Giving the young man living in poverty several quietly appalling scenes of his own that constitute his alternate, agonized account and recontextualizes the mogul’s story constitutes a big part of what makes the original film so beloved. And, essentially, Fox and Lee just do away with it, sticking with King’s point of view when encountering the kidnapper.
Without moving into spoiler territory, I’ll simply note that the devastating ending of Kurosawa’s version is recreated in Highest 2 Lowest as far as the basic setting and situation, but now completely eviscerated of serious impact. The values of the kidnapper, played by rapper A$AP Rocky, are repudiated in smug ways that will clearly have no long-term impact on King, or the audience.
King’s lasting lesson is often repeated in his adage, “All money ain’t good money.” Make old-school “quality” records in an old-school way and those profits will be “good” in ways that will take care of everything. Whereas at the end of High and Low, there is no such neat-and-tidy solution. Gondo is simply back to square one, having lost his wealth and empire. A clanging iron door that’s pulled down in his face (and ours) while he sits there immobile and gutted that is meant to resound despairingly.
What Lee chooses to substitute for Kurosawa’s stark seriousness and emphasis on the grim consequences of class hierarchy is really baffling. Ostentatious, with a hot high-contrast color scheme to counter the earlier film’s sense of cool, Highest 2 Lowest bulges in all directions with Lee’s distracting callouts to his favorite sports franchises and celebrities. Look, there’s former NBA star Rick Fox, who was cast in Lee’s He Got Game (1998), playing a small part as a high school coach, not very convincingly! Oh hey, there’s actor Rosie Perez, who got vaulted to movie prominence after she was featured in his film Do the Right Thing (1989) emceeing a street festival celebrating Puerto Rican culture!
These weaknesses seem tied into Lee’s heavy-handed nostalgia for some spurious good ol’ days when he was young and supposedly things were great in America. Before kids were on cell phones a lot, for example. Before the intertubes took over. Before capitalists were all out for profit — even in the music industry, so known for its integrity and devotion to artistry!
It’s embarrassing.
More distractions involve the performances, some of which are startlingly bad. Rick Fox isn’t the only one who’s not a slam dunk at this acting game. Hadera has an important role to play as Pam King, but nothing in her short list of previous credits (Baywatch, Billions, and She’s Gotta Have It) seems to have prepared her to bring it off. She’s quite stately and beautiful but acts like a partially animated mannequin, and this doesn’t change when she’s informed that her son has just been kidnapped. She reacts with all the distress of a supermodel who’s just heard that the hairdresser will be ten minutes late.
Dean Winters as Detective Higgins, one of the police officers managing the kidnapping case, has a role written as a cartoonishly obnoxious bigot that he plays even more over the top, to the point that he’s totally unbelievable.
And the brilliant Denzel Washington, who has such range, who’s been so searingly effective in so many films, has to overcome an age issue that’s very hard to ignore in order to play King. He’s seventy now, and though his white hair is dyed black, and he’s apparently lost about twenty pounds, there’s no making up for the fact that he’s at least twenty years too old for this part. This becomes especially painful in the action scenes, when King is supposed to be chasing down a much, much younger man — and then beating him in a vicious fistfight. Crude cutaways to a manifestly younger stuntman playing King running and fighting like a champ are laughably obvious.
And Washington’s been given so many cringe-inducing moments to play that even he can’t make them work. When King reaches the dreaded point when he absolutely must decide whether or not to pay the ransom, he goes into his mammoth rich-guy home-office to ponder it alone. Then, just when it seems like we’re about to get down to some real dark-night-of-the-soul drama, he starts reeling around yelling at the paintings of legendary singers on the walls: “What do I do, James?! What do I do, Aretha?!”
Once you remove any serious consideration of social class from material like Kurosawa’s High and Low and give up on that grim ending of accumulated horrors, you’re not left with not all that much. I suppose it could be that by now Spike Lee is just too rich and removed to invest heavily in the inherent injustice of class stratification that’s central to the source material. Lee lives in a $32 million townhouse in Manhattan, and for all we know stands out on his patio every day belting out “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to the skyline.
Great Job Eileen Jones & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
