A few days ago, a local TV newscast ran a story on the reaction of Italian Americans to Spike Lee’s latest “joint,” Summer Of Sam. According to the news piece, the film features as its centerpiece an extremely unflattering characterization of Italian Americans as stupid, foul-mouthed, tacky, bigoted goombahs, and local Italian-American dignitaries made a point of objecting to the portrayal as harmful and inaccurate, stopping just short of charging Lee with racism. At the time, I found their reaction somewhat absurd. Italian Americans could hardly come in for worse treatment than they got in Lee’s Do The Right Thing, first of all, and second of all, Spike Lee’s films always get somebody’s panties in a wad – Spike Lee’s own panties, more often than not – and if Italian Americans hadn’t gotten offended, then punks would have, or serial killers, or ignorant white folks who say “the story doesn’t ring true” when they actually mean “black folks shouldn’t try to make movies about white folks” but they don’t have the stones to come out and say so. Anyway, everyone can just save their breath, because although Summer Of Sam sucks, it doesn’t suck because of offensive stereotypes or reverse racism or any of that hoohah. It sucks because of poor plotting, gratuitous camera-angle showboating, and unconvincing scattershot storytelling – in other words, for the same reasons most sucky movies suck.

I suppose you could find something offensive in the depiction of Italian Americans in the film, but only from a cineastic point of view. (Hey, check it out – I made up a word!) Instead of taking the time to write and flesh out actual characters and dialogue, Lee settled for using a ninth-generation photocopy of a scene from GoodFellas, probably believing that a bunch of guys wearing tight shirts and gold chains and malingering on the corner and bellowing “loogadis fuckin’ guy” and “fuhgedaboudit” functions as shorthand for “Italians in the outer boroughs of New York City.” In GoodFellas, though, these scenes had a point; they gave you a sense of the relationships between the characters. Lee’s versions drag on far too long, don’t seem to have any discernible function plot-wise, bring up tangential but significant points that never get resolved, and seem to serve primarily as an excuse to show a bunch of so-called Guidos with chronologically- accurate feathered hair calling each other “fag.” I don’t find this offensive, but I’ve seen it done before, and done better. I’ve seen the chronologically-accurate thing done before too, in equally sprawling and incoherent films like Casino and Boogie Nights, and never mind the fact that I wish Hollywood’s seventies-nostalgia kick would go away already, but in seventies period pieces, the costume design becomes the star, and filmmakers often seem to believe that just-so tab-front polyester flares and cork wedgies absolve them from the responsibility of constructing an actual narrative. Summer Of Sam apes movies like 54 in the laziest fashion possible, and I started longing for an offensive tidbit to break up the monotony.

Combine the played-out mise-en-scene with undisciplined cross-cutting between barely developed plots, Very Significant Indeed musical interludes, newscasts, references to the heat wave, and shots of Lee himself parodying a local newscaster while reporting desultorily on the riots in Harlem, and the result is a confused and uncompelling film. Unimportant scenes drag on and on (womanizing Vinny and his long-suffering wife Dionna dirty-dance in a nearly empty nightclub; a local Mafioso and his henchmen read aloud from the papers), bisected by unnecessary and trite vignettes of David Berkowitz going mad by means of alphabet blocks. Seemingly crucial plot points are never resolved, and the relationships between the “main” characters are never explained. Vinny, ostensibly the protagonist of the film, comes off not as an emotionally imbalanced lothario but as an irritating twerp, and I didn’t find his sexual exploits credible (particularly not the one in the hair salon with a frighteningly over-conditioned Bebe Neuwirth). Vinny’s friend – and, Lee would have us believe, alter ego – Richie delves into the punk scene, with predictably annoying results. Richie also strips at a club called Male World, and accepts blowjobs from old men for cash. The effect of this on his relationship with his girlfriend Ruby, the neighborhood “fast girl”? Not investigated. Vinny’s constant references to the relative sinfulness of various sexual positions? Not explained, and not given a believable basis. The upshot of a huge, apparently climactic argument he and Dionna have in a cemetery after visiting a swingers’ club? Not mentioned (until she moves out, another plot point that came out of nowhere). The relationship between the hysteria over the Son of Sam and the looting in Harlem during a brownout? Not examined. Instead, Lee treats us to an endless sequence, overlaid by a Who song (have I mentioned that I despise The Who? No? Well, I despise The Who), in which Richie takes out his frustrations on his guitar, and Richie beats the stuffing out of a doll onstage at the strip club, and Vinny smokes cigarettes and tries to look conflicted, and Brian, who had earlier fallen victim to a vicious gay-bashing, struts down his block in a halter-tied shirt and sunglasses, and neighborhood tough-guy Joey T looks menacing, and toothless men leer at Richie, and Berkowitz blows a girl’s brains all over the headrest of her car – you get the idea.

Lee could have crafted an excellent film from this material, had he focused on the important stories and left flotsam like Reggie Jackson’s disagreements with Billy Martin on the cutting-room floor. He could have drawn a parallel between the fear women felt with a murderer abroad and the fear Dionna feels when faced with the disintegration of her marriage, or between Richie’s double life and Vinny’s, or between the genuine sociopath and the men driven crazy by heat and apprehension, but he didn’t. He just threw a bunch of ingredients into the blender, more than a few of which didn’t belong there, and hit “purÈe,” and after two hours of name-checking and jump cuts, I didn’t even care whether the loose ends got tied up – fortunately, because none of them ever did. The most interesting parts of the story – the feelings of powerlessness, the dynamics of crowds, the meaning of masculinity – he leaves to us to sort out. Spike Lee has a frustrating tendency to leave stories unfinished, to make the audience do more work than we should have to; he wants to get us thinking about things, I guess, but his films frequently feel like he hasn’t thought them through all the way himself. I wouldn’t call that offensive, but he can do better. He needs to finish the job, and Jimmy Breslin reading off a cue card doesn’t count as finishing.

Mr. Showbiz’s take on Spike Lee.

No, he doesn’t really look like that guy from The Practice.

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