Summer of Sam Review
by Jeremy Vay (jeremcvay AT yahoo DOT com)July 14th, 1999
Summer of Sam
(Spike Lee, USA, 1999), **1/2
The craft was, for the most part, there. It's just that the materials used in the crafting could have, perhaps, been better. This film seemed like a lesser Do the Right Thing, exploring many of the same themes, but with much less of an impact.
Most of the acting is pretty good- at least better than average. John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino, and Adrien Brody (among others) give good performances, but don't seem to have very good characters to work with. The viewer is never actually allowed to grow close enough to any of the characters to really care what happens to them. The story seems to be about how the enviroment of the time and place lead people to change and even turn on each other, but from the very beginning of the film, al the characters seem to be too wretched to really hold dear. Because of this, much of the tension simply seems forced, so when it is meant to explode, it really only seems to obscure itself somehow. Perhaps this is because Lee wastes his own stylistic talents here. He uses many clever stylistic techniquies and approaches, but because the characters and events have never become too involving, the bravura of the moment is lost and we're left with Lee's crafty camerawork or editing simply looking like a silly up-cropping of pretension.
There was one scene that was actually somewhat satisfying: a Hollywood montage sequence of the neighborhood usuals all doing their things to get through the restless summer, most of them seeming to fall apart at least a littlein the process. This is all put to the tune of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," and may be the best or most interesting seqeunces of the film, yet it loses its impact because it sticks out from the rest of the film which is mostly steps blow this. It would simply have worked better if the film had found a way to flow into and out of it, but it didn't and that is a shame because this film had probably a greater potential than was put to use.
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