Spike Lee has had a checkered history in Cannes, bringing down the house with “Do the Right Thing” in 1989 but losing the Palme d’Or to Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and being shut out of that year’s awards entirely. He was famously unhappy about that, and didn’t return for another decade until 1999’s “Summer of Sam,” and then waited almost 20 years before coming back with “BlacKkKlansman,” which won him the Grand Prix behind Palme winner “Shoplifters.”
Since then, he’s headed the jury once, and on Monday night he returned in an out-of-competition slot with “Highest 2 Lowest,” his adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama “High and Low.”
You could argue that Lee warrants a spot in competition at the festival, but “Highest 2 Lowest” doesn’t feel like the kind of Spike Lee joint that has defined him as a filmmaker. While the attention goes to “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X,” BlacKkKlansman” and others, his new film feels more like 2006’s “Inside Man,” a slick and stylish crime thriller also starring Denzel Washington that won rave reviews but has always been considered more of a genre exercise for Lee than an essential part of his oeuvre.
“Highest 2 Lowest” is a mixture of gleaming, professional filmmaking and curious choices. It’s a showcase for a classic powerhouse, Washington, and an upstart one, ASAP Rocky. Overhauling and updating Kurosawa’s film by turning the lead character from a shoe executive to a music mogul, it simultaneously drags the story into the social-media age and uses it to pay tribute to older urban dramas.
The signs that this won’t be a usual New York City drama start in its opening moments, when scenic vistas of Manhattan are accompanied by the overture to Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1943 musical “Oklahoma!,” followed by the opening song “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” playing in its entirely before Matthew Libatique’s camera zooms in on Washington’s character, David King, enjoying that beautiful mornin’ on the balcony of his high-rise overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge.
It’s a purposely anachronistic opening, and composer Howard Drossin picks up on that style with a lushly-orchestrated (if slightly jazz-inflected) score that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the era of “Oklahoma!” or the era of “High and Low.” The music is beautiful, but that carpet of orchestral melody is almost purposely jarring in the way it’s used to accompany the life of a mogul who made his fortune in R&B and hip-hop music. And for the first half of the movie, the score simply never lets up: Music plays to introduce scenes but it also continues through almost every conversation, insistent and omnipresent and often annoying regardless of what’s happening onscreen.
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What’s happening is that Washington’s music company, Stackin’ Hits Records, is struggling to break even, and another company has made an offer to acquire the label. King is worried the new owners will immediately drop the legacy artists who remain signed to deals, so he’s developed a financially risky plan to hang onto the company, though he seems to have precious little support from his board. And all of this becomes temporarily irrelevant when a phone call informs him that his son has been abducted and the kidnappers are demanding a $17.5 million ransom (in Swiss francs, apparently because they’re small).
This setup is similar to the Kurosawa film, minus the change in jobs, but Lee gives it his own spin; one of the things that “Inside Man” showed is just how propulsive a director he can be with mainstream material. He sets up the opulence of King’s life and even gives it a very old-school swagger courtesy of the increasingly melodramatic music, and of course nobody does classy swagger like Washington.
But that swagger is shaken by the kidnapping. Cops swarm the house to investigate and occasionally butt heads with King, his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and especially their chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). The most hostile of the detectives is played by Dean Winters, whose roles on “Oz” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” are perhaps less known than his part as “Mayhem” on the Allstate commercials that will get an amusing shout-out later in this film.
The first break in the case is the discovery that the kidnappers grabbed the wrong boy. Instead of taking Trey King (Aubrey Joseph), they got the chauffeur’s son, Kyle Christopher (Elijah Wright – yes, Jeffrey Wright’s real son). But the ransom demand remains the same, and King’s dilemma becomes whether he’s willing to risk money that he needs to save his company in exchange for the life of an employee and friend’s child. King goes downstairs, looks around his den and questions the idols on his walls: Brown, Hendrix, Franklin… “What would you do, James?” he asks. “What would you do, Jimi? What would you do, Aretha?”
Lee stages one of the biggest setpieces of his career in the second half of the film, when King rides the New York subway to deliver the ransom money. The director has said that he was inspired by the chase in “The French Connection,” though Gene Hackman in a car chasing a train on elevated tracks above him is inherently a lot more thrilling than Denzel Washington sitting on a subway and waiting for a phone call, even if that subway is going into the Bronx just before a Yankee game begins. By this point, the score has died down and the sequence is set to a full street-concert performance by Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri, one of a few times when the film stops to let the music play.
For true cinematic thrills, though, you can’t beat the true climax of the film, which comes in a couple of conversations that take place through glass between King and the kidnapper, an aspiring rapper called Yung Felon. Washington is, of course, a force of nature, and he is mesmerizing as King rages at the man who idolized him before he tried to take his money. But ASAP Rocky, a rapper and entrepreneur with a few decades less experience as an actor, gives as good as he gets; the arguments between the two of them are a heavyweight bout that electrifies the homestretch of the film. And by now, King has got the right soundtrack: James Brown’s “The Big Payback” one moment, his “Pay the Cost to Be the Boss” the next.
For all its burnished sheen and dramatic vistas, the heart of the film is in those conversations that blow away everything that surrounds them. Both actors bring it, Spike Lee knows how to capture it and “Highest 2 Lowest” is at its highest because of it.
A24 is releasing “Highest 2 Lowest” in the United States.
