Spike Lee’s career can be described as a lover’s quarrel with American movies — and with America, too. As he has demonstrated his mastery of established genres (the biopic, the musical, the cop movie, the combat picture, and so on), he has also reinvented them, pointing out blind spots and filling in gaps. His critique of Hollywood’s long history of ignoring and distorting black lives has altered the way we look at movies. His attempts to expand the frame and correct the record have changed the course of the cultural mainstream.
I’m tempted to say that with “Da 5 Bloods,” which debuts on Netflix on Friday, Lee has done it again. But when has he ever repeated himself? This long, anguished, funny, violent excursion into a hidden chamber of the nation’s heart of darkness isn’t like anything else, even if it may put you in mind of a lot of other things. In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.
The story, about the lethal consequences of a search for buried gold, is struck from the template of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” A journey upriver from Ho Chi Minh City into the Vietnamese interior recalls “Apocalypse Now,” which the characters have all seen. One of them is also a big “Rambo” fan.
And even as it takes up unfinished real-world business at home and in Vietnam, “Da 5 Bloods” wrestles with some of the defining myths and motifs of American cinema. It’s a western, concerned with greed, honor, loyalty and revenge. It’s a bittersweet comedy involving a group of male friends looking back and growing old. It’s a platoon picture about a dangerous mission, a father-son melodrama, an adventure story, a caper and a political provocation.
There’s more. There’s a lot. Double crosses, red herrings, dead certainties and live land mines. Furious debates about ends and means, money and morality, capitalism and imperialism. Hawaiian-print shirts, tropical drinks, OxyContin bottles and assault weapons. It doesn’t always hold together, but it never lets go.
As prologue to the main narrative, there is a churning, chronologically disordered montage of images from the ’60s and ’70s — news clips and photographs that illustrate the fateful convergence of military escalation in Southeast Asia and racial conflict in the United States. Some of the faces and voices are familiar, and the lesson is clear.
From every angle, the situation was a mess, a quagmire. For black soldiers like the five in the movie’s title, it was especially agonizing. They were asked to kill and die in a morally dubious undertaking in the service of a country that refused to treat them as full citizens. North Vietnamese propagandists (like Hanoi Hannah, played by Veronica Ngo) didn’t hesitate to point this out.
When we touch down in the present, we are in a Ho Chi Minh City hotel where the four surviving bloods — Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Otis (Clarke Peters) and Paul (Delroy Lindo) — have gathered for what looks like an old-timers’ reunion tour. Part of the Big Red One (the Army’s First Infantry Division), the men have come to look for the remains of their squad leader, Stormin’ Norman, who was killed in a firefight.
A deep thinker and a shrewd tactician, Norman has taken on almost mythical grandeur in his comrades’ memories. They refer to him as “our Malcolm and our Martin.” When the borders of the frame narrow and the color balance shifts to signify that we are back in the war, Norman is played by Chadwick Boseman, a casting choice that underlines the heroism of the character, who is stamped with the likeness of Jackie Robinson and T’Challa.
The bloods believe that somewhere in country, along with Norman’s bones, lies a strongbox full of gold bars, the property of the U.S. government until Norman and his squad claimed them, either as the spoils of war or as reparations.
The four veterans have different ideas about what should be done with the loot if they manage to recover it, and they aren’t the only interested parties. Tien (Le Y Lan), Otis’s former lover, is part of the scheme, in association with an unsavory Frenchman in a white linen suit (Jean Reno). Paul’s semi-estranged son, David (Jonathan Majors), joins the expedition, which crosses paths with a trio of international NGO workers (Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser and Jasper Paakkonen). There’s also Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), the group’s Vietnamese guide, who reminds the visiting Americans that wars never really end.
The truth of this observation is borne out in various ways, some of them bluntly literal. Lee, who wrote the script with Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo and Kevin Willmott, doesn’t escape from the exoticism that has characterized most American movies about Vietnam, and he doesn’t pursue the connections between black-power politics and international anti-imperialism as far as he might have.
But his strength as a political filmmaker has always resided in his ability to bring contradictions to chaotic life rather than to resolve them in any ideologically coherent proposition. This is the opposite of a shortcoming. It seems safe to say that America itself has never been an ideologically coherent proposition, and its greatest artists embrace havoc as a kind of birthright, producing not analyses of chaos but indelible embodiments of it.
Which brings me to Lindo. “Da 5 Bloods” is full of wonderful performances, and the warm, profane masculine banter among the bloods is a response to and a relief from the horror they have shared and still face. They all live with pride and regret, scarred in large and small ways by the trauma they endured as young men. Instead of using digital de-aging or look-alike casting, Lee places Whitlock, Lindo, Peters and Lewis alongside Boseman in the flashback scenes, which creates a sense of the uncanny immediacy of memory. The living project their present selves back into the past, while the dead never grow old.
To describe Paul as haunted would be less an understatement than a category mistake. He is a colossal, terrifying presence — an archetype in the mold of Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab, Bigger Thomas and Rambo himself. Lindo’s performance, though, is achingly specific, rigorously human scaled.
The storm of rage, guilt, resentment and self-pity that surges through Paul is traced to various sources, small tragedies that illuminate larger catastrophes. When they first meet up in Ho Chi Minh City, shaking hands and busting chops, the other guys give Paul grief for his red MAGA baseball cap. (The hat is almost a character in its own right.) “That’s right, I voted for him,” Paul declares.
Everyone knows what Spike Lee thinks of the current president, but everyone should also remember that Lee often shows an almost affectionate interest in characters whose views he finds abhorrent. (It’s a long list that encompasses John Turturro’s Pino in “Do the Right Thing” and the snarling white supremacist played by Paakkonen in “BlacKkKlansman.”) And Lee doesn’t treat Paul as a misguided reactionary. His pain is the motor and the moral of the story. He isn’t the hero of the movie. He’s the reason to see it.
Da 5 Bloods
Rated R. Blood. Running time: 2 hours 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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‘Da 5 Bloods’ Review: Black Lives Mattered in Vietnam, Too - The New York Times
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