Summer Of Sam

365 Films

Entry #148

Summer of Sam (1999)

Directed by Spike Lee

In determining what order I should proceed with regards to the films I select for this blog, I’ll make an honest confession to you: it all happens by accident.  If I’m stumped, I usually consult the Wikipedia page for films in the year____ and go off of that.  Sometimes I’ll do a retrospective of a director to coincide with a release of their new film (albeit directors with a relatively short list of credits).  Other times, I like to respond to something that triggers a sense memory within myself that instantly takes me back to the time in which I first encountered a work.  Visiting New York City at the beginning of July and subsequently getting fairly constant updates on the unbearable nature of the recently broken (let’s hope) heat wave, there was one movie that begged for a re-visit (well, two if you include Do The Right Thing but I already wrote about that so feel free to ignore this post and jump over to that one if you wish), that film is Summer of Sam.  I don’t know why I spent so much time building that up, the answer was right in the title of the post.  I saw Summer of Sam sometime over the July 2^nd weekend of its release.  Just take a minute and absorb the information that there was a time (only 14 years ago too!) when Spike Lee could get a period-ensemble-sexual revolution-serial killer-city symphony piece made in the middle of the fucking summer.  Not to put too fine a point on it (and date myself severely here) but the fact that one of our greatest living American filmmakers has to resort to crowd-funding to get his next movie made is embarrassing at worst and rage-inducing at best.  In any event, this was the third entry in what I call my personal Spike Lee trifecta.  Beginning with Get on the Bus, followed by He Got Game, and concluded with Summer of Sam these were the first Spike Lee films I saw in their initial releases and the three that began my obsession with his work.  I know I haven’t gotten to He Got Game yet but bear with me for the time being.  I remember reading a glowing review of 25^th Hour upon its release in which this particular critic remarked that he hopes Spike Lee never makes a “perfect” film because that’s just not what he does.  I can’t think of a better sentiment that more adequately describes why I love Mr. Lee’s work or one that better describes the exhilarating, fever dream known as Summer of Sam.  Some filmmakers would have approached this as a standard issue serial killer detective story, others would have taken it as a Bergman-esque dissection of a marriage in the death throes of the sexual revolution, but only Spike Lee would have stuffed all of that and more into one movie and made something as crazily ambitious as Summer of Sam.  I know a lot of times people refer to movies as ambitious as code for, “it doesn’t really work, but you can tell they were trying really hard.”  I hope you can believe me when I say that Summer of Sam is incredibly ambitious but also incredibly successful in achieving those ambitions.  In attempting to mount a portrait of what it was like to be alive in the South Bronx in the summer of 1977, Lee obviously bites off more than he can chew but the film never really suffers for it.  Ellen Kuras’ brilliant camerawork races through each scene as if trying to seek any kind of temporary relief from the heat, the fear, and the hysteria of the time.  The cast mightily embodies a plethora of neurosis, selfishness, and anxiety-ridden tics without once ever stooping to overly mannered actor bullshit.  These people feel like the complicated patterns of real life, as if we were simply plopped into the middle of their neighborhood at random.  As much as the film is obviously an amped up version of reality, there is still a commitment to verisimilitude that never allows the story to be absorbed by the funky costumes and kooky cultural touchstones of the era.  In other words, this is the story of people, which then becomes the story of a neighborhood, which then becomes the story of a borough, only to then become the story of a city, and ultimately becomes the story of a country.  Spike Lee’s thematic obsession of individuals carving out territories of New York City to coincide with their personal identities is still prevalent throughout the film.  What makes Summer of Sam so unique and so exciting is Lee’s devastating portrayal of how it can all fall apart when it’s hot outside and there’s a killer on the loose.  I can’t say enough about the bounty of riches that this film has to offer.  All I can say is it is another remarkable chapter for one of the most unjustly ignored American filmmakers of the last thirty years.