Summer of Sam
dir. Spike Lee
Touchstone Pictures

Summer of Sam is cluttered, trite and disappointing. All the more so because it begins with promise and is made with the ambition, professionalism and attention to detail that is characteristic of Spike Lee's movies.

In the beginning, the film describes itself as a tale of a New York City that is no longer, a New York City that is crime-infested and torn by its own insatiable, hedonistic quest. For the first 90 minutes or so, the city remains a viable character and the Son of Sam, the serial killer for whom the movie is named, can be seen more as a manifestation of the city’s own self-loathing than as the cartoonish, hackneyed joke he eventually becomes.

Or maybe you could say that the film begins as Spike Lee's beautiful but painful and confused love song to New York City, only to become an insipid attempt to show the dangers of our hidden desires. Lee fails to ask enough subtle and nuanced questions—what it means to be hidden, why hidden desires plague humanity or why it is so difficult but so important not to speak directly about them—to be anything but a heavy-handed film.

Whether love song or trite admonishment, it is essentially the story of Vinny (John Leguizamo) and Ritchie (Adrien Brody). Set in the Bronx, the strength of their childhood friendship is testified to by Vinny's begrudging acceptance of Ritchie's new London-punk lifestyle. A fascinating parallel is drawn between Vinny's and Ritchie's hidden passions, and the women in their lives are foils to these passions.

Vinny's inability to reconcile his love for his wife and his religious convictions is reminiscent of Harvey Keitel's conflict in Mean Streets but is never realized as carefully or subtly as was Keitel's. Moreover, Vinny's struggle turns out to be much less than an internal battle between love of a woman and love of God. It is simply an insatiable sexual appetite leading him towards self-destruction, making him not just an unsympathetic character but a despicable one that the audience cannot and does not want to relate to. In the end, the effect of Mira Sorvino's wonderful portrayal of Dionna, a woman trying to sexually please a husband who won't allow her to, is undermined by her husband Vinny's ridiculous sexual appetite.

Adrien Brody's performance is much more interesting, though fatally underdeveloped. Ritchie's career as an erotic male dancer in a low-class gay club, though never explained, is welcomingly startling in the way it is accepted by and even helps cement his relationship with Ruby (well-portrayed by Jennifer Esposito). Even more startling is how Lee finesses this scene by putting the audience in Ruby’s shoes and making us think we are going to a punk show with Ritchie, only to reveal his desperate secret. The fact that he would rather show Ruby that he is an erotic dancer than tell her is the film’s crowning achievement and a testament to the importance of cinema. But it is obscured by the film’s didactic moralizing.

In the end, the film falls prey to Lee's cardboard stereotypes and his manic and constant need to have everything spiral wildly out of control. The climax is a great relief, insuring that the audience will no longer be beaten over the head with some of the bluntest foreshadowing around. It is also void of feeling, the neighborhood vigilantes being not just detestable but paper-thin characters.

The film is both sexually explicit and violent, leaving nothing unseen and even less to the imagination. There are some very well-done montage sequences and some honestly insightful cuts, but they are drowned in a flood of meaningless and unmotivated shots and scenes.

For instance, the Son of Sam uses block letters to spell such words as "murder" or "kill" when he is not writing on walls or giving us some other clever insight into his psyche. Then there’s the talking dog, a visual device that even Conan O'Brien uses more effectively and appropriately. The constant music and the grainy film stock do little but make Summer of Sam a noisy and grainy film that blew its chance to be even mildly interesting. It remains the worst sort of film: adrift, thoughtless and over-determined but visually well-crafted enough to be disturbing.

— Will Schmenner (wdschmen at midway dot uchicago dot edu)