Blood Screening

Oscar season has been delayed a few months (what in the age of COVID hasn't been delayed?), but is starting to take shape. Spike Lee is likely to be in the mix, as he is most every time he makes a new movie -- this time for Da 5 Bloods.

In present day, a group of four friends return to Vietnam for the first time since fighting in the Vietnam War. They tell others they're going to recover the body of their fifth friend who was killed in the conflict... but they're secretly also out to recover gold bars they stole, buried, and then lost track of all those decades earlier. The movie peppers their hunt for the loot (and a hunt for them) with flashbacks to the war.

You may have seen your share of Vietnam movies before, but you likely haven't see one like this. The sheer number of black men who fought in Vietnam is an overlooked aspect to the conflict, and Spike Lee is the right director to highlight that history. A potent opening montage uses real-world footage to establish the background for this fictional narrative, before embarking on a stylized, violent look at the conflict.

That style is very Spike Lee, and you may find you love it or hate it. Maybe even both, at different times. There are unusual inserts of still photos into the action. There are visual effects that seem to be deliberately less than fully convincing. There are close-ups so extreme that you can see the reflection of the camera in an actor's eyes. But you also never lose track of where you are in the narrative; three different aspect ratios are used to separate the past, the modern city, and the modern jungle outside the city.

Another element never lost is the emotional toll of war on the characters. Spike Lee is hardly the first filmmaker to observe that war is hell for everyone -- the Vietnam war in particular. But in turning an eye toward the Black experience, to the overlooked and unappreciated, he earns extra credibility in the moments that paint Vietnamese people in a similarly sympathetic light.

The movie is a tremendous showcase for actors. Delroy Lindo is the real powerhouse here; his "peg the needle" approach to this character may strike some people as too extreme to feel natural, but I felt it was exactly the right approach to showing the complete unraveling of the character. Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr, and Norm Lewis round out the modern-day "Bloods," with Chadwick Boseman playing the fifth in the flashbacks. They're all strong individually, and stronger together as a team.

But one aspect of their performances that feels distracting to me is that it's still all of these same actors playing the characters in the flashbacks. You're never unaware that men in their late 60s are pretending to be teenagers, and while it's clear Spike Lee was deliberate in this choice, it feels to me like it's undermining the message about the horrors of war to have such a conspicuously unrealistic aspect.

Overall though, I enjoyed Da 5 Bloods more than most other Vietnam movies I've seen. It had some new things to say -- or at least a new perspective from which to be saying them -- that I appreciated. I give it a B+, and a slot on my Top 10 Movies of 2020.