Mo' Better Blues. - movie reviews

National Review, Sept 3, 1990 by John Simon

SPIKE LEE's intention with his new film, Mo' Better Blues, was to tell the life of a jazz musician accurately, not as seen in movies by white filmmakers. The sales pitch for the movie is that Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight and Clint Eastwood's Bird got it all wrong-too dark, too gloomy, too humorless, too patronizing. Now a black artist will tell it as-sorry, like it really was or, rather, is, since the time is a vague present. Unfortunately, what we get is mo' worse.

There was indeed much to criticize about those two movies. But are we to believe that it is the "white sensibility" that undercut them? However that may be, the corrective is not Mo' Better Blues, which has no more character development, no more originality of plot, and rather less, or less good, music than the two films Lee keeps badmouthing. It also has prettification of the jazz-club surroundings, ugly whiffs of anti-Semitism, and horribly formulaic story-telling to contend with. But yes, it does have more jazz musicianly humor-such as it is.

Let me confess that I know little about jazz, and that most of my information here comes from Lee's companion volume to the film, and from the review by Gary Giddins, The Village Voice's jazz and, more recently, movie critic. That Giddins's review, after listing numerous faults, is nevertheless a rave, strikes me as odd. For example, if Jewish club owners such as Max Gordon, Art D'Lugoff, and Barry Josephson were notably fair to black musicians, why should their film alter egos-ineptly called Moe and Josh Flatbush-be presented as bloodsuckers? And if a good many club owners were Italian (as the actors portraying the Flatbushes, John and Nicholas Turturro, are), why does Lee, in an interview with the New York Post, say that the majority were Jewish? Giddins notes such things, disapproves, and promptly forgets.

Conversely, no one in Mo' Better Blues does drugs. That's like making a movie about Scotland without a kilt in it; or, more precisely, about a string quartet without showing a viola. The two jazz clubs depicted are speciously spacious and attractive; one of them is Art Deco and called Beneath the Underdog; that is the title of Charlie Mingus's autobiography, but hardly an alluring name for a club. Although the film's protagonist, Bleek Gilliam, trumpeter and leader of a quintet, complains, "I'm sick and tired of playing before everybody but my own people," the film keeps showing largely black audiences at both the Dog" and, later, the Dizzy Club. "Why did Lee write a movie about a trumpet player," Giddins asks, "when he obviously idolizes Coltrane, and allows saxophones to dominate the soundtrack?" He goes on to decry the inappropriateness of an opening theme for strings, a sequence of church chords, a parody of radio-play music, but quickly forgives all.

Most of the music is by Bill Lee, Spike's father, in a case of inverse nepotism, for most of it is lackluster. The big number, performed at the Dizzy, "Harlem Blues," has good words by W. C. Handy, and pallid music by Raymond Jones. The montage near the end, showing Bleek's marriage, fatherhood, and redemption, and lasting, as Spike tells us, seven minutes and 46 seconds "because that's the length of Love Supreme,' the monumental jazz recording of John Coltrane," which plays "over, underneath, and with" it, covers eight years. The music is bebop all right, but to my ears no more impressive than the

montage itself, which is reminiscent in style of the commercials Lee has been making for TV.

But what is truly awful about the movie is its maniacal parallelism and circularity, arbitrary bits of heavy handed symmetry Spike keeps imposing over and over again, more like elementary geometry than enlightened filmmaking.

Mo' Better Blues ("mo' better," like "the nasty" or boning," is a jive synonym for the sex act) is the story of Bleek Gilliam, a brilliant trumpeter whose motto is "My music! Everything else is secondary." He rules his band with a fist of iron, although Shadow, his gifted sax player, is becoming more and more rebellious, and Left Hand Lacey, his pianist, is a dandy who carries on with white women and is (because of that?) always late for rehearsal. Bleek conducts simultaneous affairs with Clarke Bentancourt, a record-store cashier with aspirations to be a singer, and Indigo (no last name given), a grade-school teacher. His loyalty is greater to the band's runty manager, the self-styled Giant Spike himself), who is both incompetent at getting good contracts from the club owners and a compulsive gambler, always in debt, with the musicians having to bail him out. But having been friends with him since third grade, Bleek won't fire him.

There is also Big Stop, Bleek's worldly-wise father, full of good advice; Butterbean, the comic at the club, who may be funny, but, as the late Robin Harris plays him, would require subtitles to prove it; and Petey, the Hispanic bookie to whom Giant keeps losing and whose black goons, assuring Giant that they would not kill a black brother, merely keep breaking his various bones (a less fun type of boning) and thoughtfully dropping him off at the hospital.