Get On The Bus

365 Films

Entry #123

Get On The Bus (1995)

Directed by Spike Lee

Cinematic logic dictates that a film constructed and presented in the manner of Get On The Bus is a dicey proposition at best.  A feature length fictionalized bus trip from South Central to DC to attend 1995’s Million Man March complete with a cast of characters representing a cross-section of the Black Male experience in America should have been disastrous.  Complicated human beings should have been reduced to types serving as a mouthpiece for a writer and director to score a lot of cheap political points.  In other words, make the exact same type of movie Spike Lee’s detractors continually accuse him of making.  Rest assured, Get on the Bus is most definitively NOT that movie and it is one of the most quietly humane films Lee has ever made.  Instead of filling the story with a tired series of plot contrivances, Lee and writer Reggie Rock Bythewood keep the majority of the action contained inside the bus.  Sure there are a few, minor rest stops along the way but even those feature characters who continually surprise and confound our expectations.  In other words, this is not a film about taking the easy way out or taking cheap shots in regards to its characters.  This is a film structured entirely around an aspect of Lee’s filmmaking for which I don’t believe he receives enough credit.  Spike Lee loves the way people talk, watch any of his films and you’ll see that perhaps the most consistent attribute his characters use to define themselves and their particular place in time is speech.  This doesn’t mean Lee is in love with his own words (again, Bus was not written by Mr. Lee) but he that he is endlessly fascinated by the way his actors reconstitute the words into their own unique speech pattern and how that becomes one of their defining characteristics.  It sounds simple enough but watch enough mediocre, un-ambitious movies and you’ll see how difficult this feat is to accomplish.  For my money, you have to be a filmmaker as in love with acting and human beings in general as Mr. Lee appears to be.  Get On The Bus is a strange movie for me because while I don’t consider it to be one of Lee’s milestones, I can’t deny the fact that this is the film, which cemented my passion for his particular style of filmmaking.  It began with Malcolm X and elevated a bit with Clockers but Get On The Bus is where I first saw the inherent poetry of Mr. Lee’s films displayed with full force.  It doesn’t hurt that this specific bus is stocked with some of the greatest actors on the planet: Charles S. Dutton, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Ossie Davis, Andre Braugher, and Wendell Pierce! Mr. Pierce has about a five-minute cameo in this film and he could have done nothing for the rest of his acting career and I would have been forever indebted to Mr. Lee for introducing me to this man’s boundless talent.  I can’t say this enough but it is Mr. Lee’s humane and compassionate eye that really shines in this film and I believe it is this primary quality that has always kept me coming back.  It’s hard to deny that the man does not love human beings in all of their mixed up, failed, reaching, and confused glory.  I suppose I’ll wrap this up by highlighting another one of the actors previously mentioned (because this is really an actor’s showpiece) and that is Ossie Davis.  This was the second to last collaboration between Mr. Lee and Mr. Davis (apparently he was in She Hate Me but we can all agree to pretend that never happened, right?)  From Da Mayor to The Good Reverend Doctor Purify, from Coach Odom to the final narration of Malcolm X, Mr. Davis proved to be an immaculate presence in all of Mr. Lee’s films.  Never shying away from playing ignorant and pathetic men but always radiating a kind of warmth and humor that made his characters impossible to categorize.  Watching Get on the Bus again reminded me how much I missed Mr. Davis’ presence in film and theater.