As one of the rare independent
filmmakers whose work from its earliest days earned critical acclaim and turned
a pretty decent profit, Spike Lee for some time enjoyed a special position in
contemporary American cinema. His most recent movies, however, pleased neither
critics nor audiences, either flopping at the box office or traveling directly
to cable television and DVD, without attracting much attention at all. Judging
by his newest picture, Inside Man, he
never allowed those failures to deter him, but instead somehow managed to
acquire the financing to make what must be his biggest and most expensive film,
a mainstream studio production in the grand Hollywood
tradition.
An action genre picture, Inside Man simply by its very nature
represents a significant departure for Lee, whose previous work generally
examines in more ordinary settings the significant, volatile topic of race in America.
Although it naturally and perhaps unavoidably deals with some more or less
incidental racial issues, the movie’s real subject evolves from its perfectly
engaging surface plot into a somewhat ironic demonstration of the intricate
manner in which powerful people manipulate others through subtle kinds of
blackmail. By the time it ends, all the major characters possess some object or
information that enables them to triumph.
The movie shows a familiar caper, a
sort of blockbuster version of Dog Day
Afternoon (which a character mentions), a
carefully planned bank robbery involving a major hostage situation. Clive Owen
plays Dalton Russell, the cool, confident leader of a small group of thieves
who enter a bank in lower Manhattan,
disabling the electronic surveillance and tying up the customers and employees.
Denzel Washington plays Keith Frazier, Russell’s
adversary, the hostage negotiator who must rescue the prisoners and persuade
the army of policemen to hold off storming the bank and potentially harm
innocent people.
While the movie settles into the
usual standoff, the focus of action jumps around through a variety of points of
view and several layers of chronology that complicate the narrative’s
essentially static situation. Because the criminals dress all the hostages in
the same coveralls and masks that they wear, the police cannot identify their
targets and may very well slaughter all the wrong people, a possibility shown
in a hypothetical flash forward. In addition, as Frazier begins to realize, the
robbers follow a most unusual and puzzling plan — instead of working on a
tight, tense timetable, they stall and hesitate, slowing down the negotiations
and drawing out the time.
In addition to attempting to
negotiate the release of the hostages and solve the puzzle of the criminals’
methods and goals, the detective must cope with the interference of high-level
politicians and influential fixers. The bank’s president (Christopher Plummer)
engages a smart wheeler-dealer, Madeline White (Jodie Foster), to offer the
crooks money and a light sentence in order to prevent them taking an
incriminating document from his safe deposit box. A manipulator of the rich and
powerful, with the mayor at her beck and call, White becomes as important an
adversary as the gang leader, another problem for the detective.
The director interrupts the narrative
of the robbery with flash forwards to grainy police videotapes of the
detectives interrogating the hostages, attempting to find out just who is a
victim, which nicely demonstrates their utter confusion — nobody can separate
the bad guys from the good guys. Despite (or perhaps because of) some rather
large leaps of logic, the picture’s puzzle maintains a constant tension and
excitement, never fully resolved until the conclusion, which itself involves a
series of twists and switches.
With the help of an ingenious script
and some competent performers, Lee manages, within the strictures of the genre,
to add some of his characteristic touches. He uses some effective overhead
camera shots to suggest a kind of graceful choreography in the gang’s assault
on the bank, and naturally includes the most familiar and essentially
ridiculous Spike Lee shot, involving placing a character and a camera on a
dolly and moving them away from a static background, for no apparent purpose at
all. That shot, and Inside Man itself, however, demonstrate that Lee can retain some of his own style while
directing a mainstream motion picture, which not incidentally, may be the best
film he’s made in recent years.
Inside Man (R),directed
by Spike Lee, is playing at Culver Ridge 16, Eastview
Mall 13, Greece Ridge Cinema, Henrietta 18, Pittsford Cinema, Tinseltown, Webster 12.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2006.
