Photo credit: Parrish Lewis, Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios
Spike Lee’s CHI-RAQ re-imagines Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy “Lystrata” as modern plea for peace in violence-torn Chicago. Chi-Raq is a term the director reportedly heard on the streets, used to compare violence-racked Chicago neighborhoods to war-torn Iraq. In the classic Greek play, the women on both sides of warring Sparta and Troy join together to end the war by staging a sex boycott. No sex for the men until there is no war. In CHI-RAQ, the Spartans and the Trojans are opposing gangs in a disadvantaged neighborhood, where their violent warfare is killing children in the streets.
It is a clever idea, moving this ancient comedy to Chicago’s bloody streets, using humor, music, sex and truth-telling to put a spotlight on the situation in these disadvantaged city neighborhoods. Sometimes a person just has to speak out, even if nothing will change, and that is what Lee is doing – expressing his views on gun violence, the lack of economic opportunity, the lousy schools, and the other challenges facing these neighborhoods, all within an entertaining film.
The film is funny, angry, wildly imaginative and hard-hitting. It is not a perfect film but it is a moving one, fired by Spike Lee’s passion to get people to do the right thing. It may be among the director’s best, even if success for its mission seems remote.
The director tells the story through rap, with much of the dialog in rhyme and sprinkled with some terrific musical numbers. The film uses dark, raw, biting humor and a sarcastic, truth-telling tone. There is nothing subtle about Lee’s film. He starts out with a hip-hop song about Chi-Raq, with the lyrics in large letters on screen, in case you might miss some. When the song ends, the word emergency in giant red letters flashes on screen while a voice urgently repeats the word. The film then moves to a club where a hip-hop artist named Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) is performing the song in front of a packed house – until gunfire breaks out.
Although he denies it, Chi-Raq is associated with the Spartan gang. The Trojans are led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes), a one-eyed tough guy. Chi-Raq tells his lady Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) he is a musician, not a gang member, but that is not the way Cyclops sees it. When an 11-year-old girl is shot in the street in the middle of the day and no one arrested, Lysistrata organizes the women, including Cyclops’ wife Irene (Jennifer Hudson), to stop the war by staging a “sex strike” – no peace, no nookie (although the director uses a more graphic term).
The same boycott was used in Africa recently, when the women of Liberia organized a sex strike that ended their civil war. Lee makes reference to that real-world event in the film, although neighborhood wise woman Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) is clearly aware of the theatrical/historical roots. Lee has assembled a stellar cast, which also includes a wonderfully sly Samuel L. Jackson as narrator Dolmedes, who provides biting, sarcastic commentary, and John Cusack as a priest who grew up nearby and returned to lead a black church standing up to the violence. If there is a flaw in that cast, it is that it could use a few more young stars to connect more with a younger audience.
The film is clearly Spike Lee speaking out and hoping to do something to stop the violence racking city neighborhoods in Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore, all mentioned in the film. The director makes gun violence a center of his commentary, with gun-profiteers crossing state lines to buy them at gun shows, to evade Chicago’s strict gun laws, and selling them on the street. But he says more, with characters or the narrator commenting on neglected neighborhoods, places gripped with fear of gangs who do not care about innocent life lost as “collateral damage,” and police equipped with military surplus coming out in force to stop a protest but absent and ineffective when a little girl is shot. In one chilling bit of dialog, the narrator notes their children go from “third-rate schools to first-rate prisons,” and “now they are privatized, so it is profitable too.”
At the same time, it is clear Lee sees that chances of success, that the film will prompt real change, are not good. In one scene, Cusack delivers a fiery sermon to his congregation, listing the range of problems racking the neighborhood including the code of silence that protects the guilty, but we also notice he is “preaching to the choir.” In a classic Western, the people in the packed church, whipped into a frenzy of outrage, would pour out of the church and go get the bad guys. Instead, they simply go home. Lee is too good a filmmaker for that not to be a conscious reference. Near the film’s end, the sex boycott has spread around the world, and multinational companies promise jobs for the people in the neighborhood – and not minimum wage jobs. That seems a bit of highly unlikely wish-fulfillment on the director’s part, as well as a dig at those who could do more.
CHI-RAQ is powerful, even heart-breaking stuff wrapped in a dark, hip-hop musical comedy. Even if it seems unlikely to actually change anything, at least Spike Lee had his say.
CHI-RAQ opens in theaters on Friday, December 4th, 2015.
OVERALL RATING: 4 OUT OF 5 STARS
