She Hate Me (2004)
Not so much a film as a complete
mishmash of several very bad ideas, Spike Lee's latest
offering also suffers from bad acting, a horrible
choice of score music and a wavering storyline that
ends up making very little sense. What was Lee thinking?
The acting here from the very first
frame is just bad. We also accept it as a homage to
Lee's early films, which were so low budget that they
had a certain "bad" vibe to them at times, when Ellen
Barkin comes into the film and is just as bad as everyone
else here. At two hours and twenty fucking minutes,
"She Hate Me" has lots of time to redeem itself but
even Lee stalwarts and famous faces like Ossie Davis,
his sister Joie, Jim Brown, Brian Dennehy, Woody Harrelson,
John Turturro, and Q-Tip can't make the film better.
In fact, most of them do an awful job.
But it is Lee's script that is really
to blame here. Working with actor Michael Genet on
the thespians script, Lee is in serious need of an
editor here. The script goes all over the place. When
Lee breaks away from his narrative to tell the story
of the African-American janitor who called the police
on the Watergate break-in party, we know his film
has become an unfocused mess.
There's two stories going on here.
The more typical Lee film is about how America and
society doesn't care and respect for the whistle-blowers
who inform the police and the public of their employers
evil-doing. This is an outdated notion and Lee's own
film proves it. He doesn't mention the fact that the
film "The Insider" glorifies a whistle-blower but
he does show a "Time" magazine cover that names three
of them as "People of the Year." While this story
may be relevant in the George W. Bush America of 2004,
when political corruption is rampant, Lee doesn't
quite hit the mark with it.
He mainly misses by inserting (no
pun intended but its a good pun isn't it?) a secondary
story about how his main character begins taking money
from lesbians to father their children. Now, if there
is any director who should be the second-to- the-last
choice to direct a film about gays, it might very
well be Lee. Let's face it, while gay people can easily
relate to and understand the bigotry and struggle
that Africa-American people have faced since the moment
the first slave ship hit the shores of America, the
reverse has never been true. As a stereotypical generality,
black people by and large have no sympathy for gay
people at all. And while Ricki Lake has made inroads
to changing all that, we still got a long way to go,
girl.
Lee's film borders on ridiculous
homophobia when it begins to suggest that it is shameful
for a man to sell his sperm so that lesbians could
have their own babies (this might play into the theme
of how African-American men have abandoned their children
in society leading to many single-parent homes in
low-income families but Lee Barely mentions that).
His protagonist actually says he "is not proud" of
what he has done after supposedly impregnating over
15 lesbians. What's not to be proud of? Lee never
gives us a reason to understand why his character
might say this.
The film also ends with the notion
that no woman and no family could be complete without
a man. Hogwash.
But these ideological problems are
just the icing on the cake of bad things in "She Hate
Me." The film is poorly written, badly acted, poorly
shot and poorly edited. And it is scored with the
most improbably music imaginable by Terrance Blanchard.
And it runs way too long.
As the straight guy said when he
entered the sausage party, "There's really nothing
to like here." Nothing at all.
