Why you watch: Crooklyn (1994)

It’s time for Spike Lee’s love letter to his mother and his neighborhood to be rediscovered for what it still is: an act of radical exuberance.

There’s no doubt that White America’s crash course on systemic racism is long overdue and like most cram sessions, it’s going to involve some awkward mistakes, like that parade of A-listers apologizing in some perverse Calvin Klein ad from the 90s. Meanwhile, plenty of white liberals are simply running off to fill their bookshelves with “White Fragility” and “How to Be An Anti-Racist,” while binge-watching anything that puts the suffering of African Americans front and center.

Yet I get this sense that we’re placing the work of black creators into a big cultural basket called “White People Homework” and ignoring the books, movies, and TV that concerns black lives exclusively, beyond their collisions with whites. There are a lot more examples on TV right now, with ATLANTA, INSECURE, and THE CHI centering their storylines on a vast range of black experiences.

Still, TV by its very nature doesn’t have the same scale or power as that big screen, or that potent hundred and twenty minutes that lends any ordinary action a certain epic import. I know that movies about racial bias seem more vital right now, but they can’t be the only work we celebrate. Maybe they don’t feel “important” or “big” enough, but why can’t we highlight a black filmmaker doing their own riff on something like TERMS OF ENDEARMENT with an all-black cast?

Spike Lee did just that with CROOKLYN, which garnered warm reviews and a little bit of money but dropped out of the conversation when discussing Spike’s career or African American flicks in general. That doesn’t mean it was forgotten, as it topped the inaugural “One Film, One New York” contest back in 2017. But it’s still hard to find, and it certainly didn’t launch a string of similar family dramas from black filmmakers.

It should have.

CROOKLYN is based loosely on Spike’s own Brooklyn childhood and his mother. Written with his sisters Joie and Cinque, it’s a coming-of-age story set in 1973 about Troy (Zelda Harris) a little girl that’s stuck with four brothers, a struggling musician dad (Delroy Lindo) and a stressed-out, wonderful mother (Alfre Woodard). The soundtrack probably made more money than the movie, with wall-to-wall classic R&B running beneath most of it.

But this is still Spike, not James L. Brooks. The camera dips and zooms and flies about, capturing the incessant chaos of a family that big crammed in an apartment. There are practical jokes and outright rage, as Spike doesn’t touch the brakes until nearly twenty minutes in, orchestrating the constant fighting and bickering like the best musical numbers he’s ever filmed, often juggling three layers of action all at once.

Any true New Yorker understands the street outside is everyone’s living room and Spike treats it as such for Troy. Her neighbors, even the broken, the odd, and the cruel, are her extended family. There are only a handful of minor white characters, with Walter Hill’s stock player David Patrick Kelly playing two roles himself.

The largely all-black cast normalizes them as simply a family, not in comparison to their white neighbors, but as simply… neighbors. Spike doesn’t ignore racial strife, taking the time to show one neighbor, a Vietnam vet with PTSD (Isiah Washington) getting hauled off by the police for striking that one white neighbor in the midst of an argument.

Nor does he pretend that race is irrelevant with some token white pal to play some cheap kumbaya note. Instead, he maintains the spotlight on Troy and her family, just like a white filmmaker gets to do with white families, all the time. Spike gave himself permission to tell a story of joy and family devotion without wasting time on how that relates to white people.

As such, it’s a delightful slice of life dramedy, ambling along, even as Troy’s parents struggle to make ends meet. Spike tackles this in savvy ways, as when a road trip is interrupted when the power gets shut off. We had the same “problem” while I was growing up, and the magic of turning on the lights when the power is restored still moves me like few things I’ve watched.

But Spike avoids the trap of letting poverty define who these people are, a habit that well-meaning filmmakers make on a near-constant basis. I get it. In America, if someone isn’t suffering incessantly or in some grotesque manner, why are they worth helping? Don’t our hard lives ennoble us? Isn’t that why rich folks balk at paying taxes or a living wage because everyone deserves the luxury of playing the underdog? Everyone, that is, but their own kids.

Troy is wonderfully drawn, not as some precocious girl written with the voice of a snarky urbane screenwriter, but as an actual kid, who is stubborn, weird and wonderful, without having magic powers or some world-class talent, which is what most YA lit tells kids they need to matter at all. Troy can be petty and tired and mean. But in letting her be imperfect, it feels like a grace rarely afforded black girls, even in the supposed Wokeville of American pop culture.

The movie’s real feat is how the movie depicts the marriage of Lindo and Woodard. He is a musician unwilling to sully his gifts with commercial concerns, which is usually celebrated, but here Spike points out that his integrity is bought and paid for by Woodard’s many jobs and her own sacrifices. Woodard’s complaints are delivered with such a hefty layer of exhaustion we sense that she’s held her tongue for years.

When Woodard calls her husband out, Lindo throws a tantrum. He feels ashamed that his best music won’t keep the lights on, and Lindo, whose rich baritone can shake walls with a whisper, chooses a higher octave here, morphing his protest into a whine. He’s not threatening his wife, just cracking under the weight of his own dashed expectations.

Troy eventually is sent to stay with her far wealthier aunt and uncle down South for a spell. Spike films this sequence with anamorphic lenses to squeeze the image and accentuate Troy’s alienation to her surroundings. This choice only works intellectually, but the gags here are still so ably staged it doesn’t matter.

Troy gets to see how the other half lives, but still vastly prefers the chaos and frustration of her Brooklyn brownstone to the silent, prudish boredom of her rich relatives. Spike doesn’t treat these people as evil, just stressed in their own way. He stays centered on Troy’s experiences in a way a white filmmaker wouldn’t. They’d be too tempted to introduce a subplot about the Klansman next door.

When she returns to Brooklyn, she’ll find her first real taste of heartbreak, not from a boy, but from a loss that no little girl should face. Her mother is diagnosed with cancer. When Woodard passes, we see the full spectrum of Troy’s reaction from silent shock, to rage, to a certain reluctant acceptance. Spike slyly hints Lindo will step up as a parent in her absence and with that, we realize this was always a coming of age story for both Troy and her father.

And it’s exactly the kind of movie other black filmmakers should be funded to make a lot more often. They shouldn’t be relegated to just superhero epics or biopics that treat historical figures as superheroes. They should get to tell tales of ordinary human beings struggling with things beyond white supremacy. This isn’t some diatribe against movies addressing racial conflict, but an argument that we can’t stop there. We need to celebrate the black voices that make gross-out comedies, family dramas, crime pictures, sci-fi Westerns, and the rest. In short, call Carl Franklin right the fuck now.

It’s nice to see that so many white folks seem more willing to say that “Black Lives Matter,” but that’s only a start. As we work to lift black voices, we should most certainly let those voices make the movies they want to make, and not just the movies we think we need about race. They should get to make movies for themselves, period, and my guess is audiences, regardless of race, will find them a lot more engaging that any homework they ever planned on doing.

CROOKLYN is currently available for rent on iTunes, Amazon Prime, and other streaming platforms.

Why You Watch is a weekly series looking at forgotten, rarely seen, or underrated movies for what they can teach about culture and filmmaking craft. Show some love by sharing it, or follow me here or on Twitter, @arthousepunch.