Photo: Universal / 40 Acres & A Mule

Clockers never quite got going for me.

I liked a lot of things about it: the bleakly vintage credits and the smudgy feeling of the film stock and lighting; Lee’s typical dark humor, like Keitel and Turturro’s detectives swigging in unison from airline bottles of booze en route to a crime scene; that unmistakably Lee sense of the city in hot weather, the closeness of the air with a zing of sex; the “Gangsta” video game. I also didn’t mind a lot of things I feel like I should have, like the didactic quality of the cops’ “casual” racism, or the speeches almost but not quite put over by Keith David as project cop Andre and Delroy Lindo as local kingpin Rodney. Lee sometimes can’t resist making sure you got it, but exchanges like “We were looking for the Short Hills Mall.” “It ain’t here” do a lot to smooth that over for me.

But the speeches are the problem with the movie, not because they’re preachy, although they are — the company, particularly Keitel, takes a stylized approach to them, so that helps — but because it often seems like Richard Price’s original novel and Lee’s rewrites are fighting each other. I say this without having read Clockers, but I did read Lush Life and watched The Wire, and I’ve seen enough of Lee’s work to know that he and Price share an ability to identify the characters from whom and the circumstances under which the viewer/reader will buy a lecture as realistic dialogue. So it’s unfortunate that the two voices kind of take turns singing instead of harmonizing, because it saps the movie of momentum.

Clockers is Mekhi Phifer’s big break, and he’s magnetic; the bleeding-ulcer “character” beat is tedious, but he plays it as well as he can, and the final, childlike shot of him is on point. But he doesn’t evolve with the plot, which sees his middle-management clocker caught between the cops and his boss Rodney as everyone tries to pin the blame for a shooting on Phifer’s Strike instead of accepting that his straight-arrow brother, Victor, really is responsible. Phifer’s good at annoyance and swagger, less skilled with the confusion and outright terror Strike should feel as the climactic death starts closing doors for him, and he’s one part of the film where you can really see that Lee’s writing (and Phifer shines with that atmospheric draw-the-neighborhood stuff, like the guys arguing about rapper “authenticity”) and Price’s kind of bouncing off each other.

It’s not a bad movie by any means, but it’s a little flat, a little disappointing.

What is film fiber? It’s the movies I feel it’s necessary to have watched in order to participate in the cultural conversation. Canon, in other words, and whether it’s good or enjoyable isn’t the point. The point, as our exasperated sophomore-English teacher noted on the subject of The Scarlet Letter: “You can hate Pearl all you want, but if you can’t tell me what she means, you’re going to fail this class.”

For more bowls of Film Fiber, click the “Film Fiber” tag below.

Next up on Film Fiber, and I should note that these seldom remain accurate because I have an untreated queue-shuffling compulsion, but anyway, in theory it’s: Atlantic City

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