Spike Lee has never been known for subtlety. This isn't a criticism, just a fact. Visually, narratively, sonically; his movies have long forgone the implied for the explosive. And on first glance, Bamboozled, his newest offering, seems like a prime candidate for overkill. (Come on--Spike taking on minstrely?) So when Damon Wayans' stiff-backed buppie Pierre Delacroix appears in the first shot, reciting the definition for "satire" as the room spins behind him, the movie looks headed for the morass of "classic Spike Lee": the camera tricknology and overbearing manner that's come to define his oeuvre. But the vertigo of self-consciousness fades quickly to blackface, and the viewer instead gets treated to one of the most controlled and intelligent works that Lee's brought to the screen.
Wayans' opening monologue is, in a sense, quintessential Spike Lee. At least, it's emblematic of one side of the man--that of the heavy-handed cineaste who too often sublimated his talent to polemic. That Lee is present in the bluster and caricature of School Daze, in the broadbrushed platitudes of Mo' Better Blues and the unrecognizable soup of Girl 6. But among and even within his missteps, there's always been a calm and insightful auteur; his debut feature She's Gotta Have It showed precocious brilliance, and he's shown an increasingly ability to place his flair in the service of a larger story. Indeed, this is the third consecutive film--after He's Got Game and Summer of Sam--that shows a steadying of sensibility, a maturation.
What fuels Bamboozled is an odd paradox: this, his most satirical movie, is also his most earnest, racially charged since Do The Right Thing and Jungle Fever (though X was undeniably about race, it was more a biopic than a commentary). Yes, Spike Lee is a race man; he's never shied away from that. But Bamboozled marks the first time he's taken on the issue with playfulness and an effort to point the camera on himself (not in the literal sense, of course; his onscreen time approaches Woody Allen levels). So after the camera steps back, and Wayans steps off of the dolly cart, the movie begins its real mission: skewering the commodification of race in the Urban Age. Popular entertainment's parasitic dependence on the black community is first on the kabob, but it's followed by appropriation and mimicry at the individual level (Michael Rapaport's eerily accurate blacker-than-thou "nigga"-spouting white television executive is one of surprisingly good performances in the film), and then a double twist--making the minstrels black--that questions black-pepetrated standards of authenticity.
Make no mistake: the targets in Bamboozled have been targets before--just in a weaker movie. Sure, there's a white fascination with black culture that borders on paternalistic; sure, class resentment exists within the black community; sure, hip-hop suffers from a pathological conflation of violence with the "real" black experience; sure, white-owned media channels have been disseminating modern-day shuck-and-jive for some time now. But Lee's willingness to point fingers at metaphorical minstrels both white and black (roles fulfilled deftly by Rapaport and Mos Def) gives the movie its crucial wink. As confrontational as the movie is--no one wants to confront racism, and the much-maligned promotional posters of a down-South caricature eating a watermelon have shown as much--the indiscriminate evils of greed and status quo take precedence over skin color. Minstrelry is one of our lasting national shames, but it's not Lee's aim to rub it in our faces; that would be too easy. Instead, it becomes one of many transactions (as do sex, race, money, and death) in the film's everything-is-currency world, and Lee gains control of a movie that could too easily have gotten far, far out of hand.