Do the Right Thing (1989) Review
10/10
Official trailer
A DJ opens the morning. A man sits under an umbrella. A pizzeria opens, a delivery boy starts work, three men take up position on a corner, and the temperature is going to reach a hundred degrees. By the end of the day somebody will be dead and a building will be burning. The 10 is for the most formally controlled American film of its decade and the one with the most nerve. Lee built a structure where somebody who has a case argues every position, and then declined to adjudicate.
Lee’s film sets off anger and laughter, often inside the same minute, and I come out of it wrung out. He never tells me who’s right. He sets me down on a hundred-degree street with all these people and leaves me to work out where I stand, and I respect that about as much as anything a director can do.
Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture that year. This wasn’t nominated in the category. That’s the fact the Academy has never satisfactorily explained and which the record now states permanently.
The Block Is the Structure
The entire film takes place on one street across roughly twenty hours, and the geography is established so completely that an audience can navigate it by the second act.
Sal’s pizzeria, the Korean grocery, the brownstone stoops, the corner where the three men sit, the mural wall, the hydrant. Each is a fixed position and each has people attached to it who don’t move much.
That fixity makes the film work. Nobody arrives from outside, nobody leaves, and the pressure has nowhere to dissipate to. That means the heat and the block are the same mechanism.
The temperature is also the clock. The film states it repeatedly through the DJ, and the escalation of the day and the escalation of the plot are the same curve. That requires no plotting at all.
Lee also shot it on a real block, on Stuyvesant Avenue, with the production clearing and dressing two buildings and working there for eight weeks. The street isn’t a set and the neighborhood was present throughout. The production also paid to clear two crack houses off the street and kept a security presence for the duration. That’s a piece of location history that belongs in any account of the film and is rarely included in one. Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Senor Love Daddy is the mechanism for that and he’s also the film’s one authority nobody disputes. He states the temperature, addresses the block, names everybody, and is the only character who can speak to all of them at once.
Jackson is a joy in this part. Every time the DJ cuts in, I feel the temperature climb another degree, and I think the film would be half as alive without that voice holding the block together.
A single location with fixed positions and no exits produces pressure without any contrivance. The reader learns the geography and then every movement inside it means something. The heat is the second half of the mechanism. A physical condition that worsens on a schedule gives you escalation for free. Attach people to places. Somebody who occupies one corner for a whole work is a fact about the world before they’re a character.
Remove the exits. If anybody can leave, the reader is waiting for them to, and the tension is about departure instead of about proximity.
Everybody Has a Case
The film’s central achievement is that somebody the audience can follow argues every position in it.
Sal built the pizzeria, has fed the neighborhood for twenty-five years, is fond of Mookie, and believes the wall is his. Buggin Out thinks a business taking money from a Black neighborhood should have a Black face on the wall. Both arguments are coherent and the film presents both without weighting.
Aiello’s Sal is the performance I keep coming back to. I like Sal. I also understand exactly why the block turns on him, and Aiello never once asks me to pick a side.
Pino is a racist and is also the only person in the family who says out loud that they don’t belong there, which the film treats as a real observation delivered by somebody contemptible.
Mother Sister and Da Mayor disagree about respectability. The three men on the corner disagree with everybody. Radio Raheem wants to be left alone with his music.
Smiley is the character most people forget and he’s doing specific work. He sells photographs of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King together, almost everybody dismisses him, and he’s the person who puts the picture on the wall at the end.
The Korean grocers are the position most often overlooked. They’re recent arrivals, are working constantly, are resented, and are given a single line at the climax that saves their store, and the film neither develops them nor treats them as scenery. Sal’s sons are the other split the film sets up carefully. Pino wants out and Vito doesn’t, they disagree about it in front of customers, and the film establishes that a family business contains its own argument about whether to stay.
What the film never supplies is a character who states the correct view. Every speech is compromised by who is delivering it. That’s the reverse of how films about this subject are normally built.
The Formal Devices
The film uses direct address, a montage of racial slurs delivered to camera, canted angles, a color palette pushed toward red, and a soundtrack that’s diegetic almost throughout. Ernest Dickerson shot it in warm, saturated tones with almost no cool light anywhere, and the effect is physical. The audience is hot for two hours because everything on screen is orange. The slur montage is the most confrontational sequence and it’s the film’s clearest structural statement. Six characters in turn deliver racial abuse directly at the lens, about each other, and the sequence is broken by the DJ telling everybody to cool down. Nobody is exempted. That’s the point of doing it that way.
Public Enemy’s Fight the Power is used as Raheem’s music and not as score. That means the film’s most famous piece of sound belongs to a character and stops when he’s not present.
Bill Nunn also gets the film’s best physical idea. Raheem is a man who has decided to occupy space with sound, the boombox is enormous, and the arrangement is both a statement of presence and the thing that gets him killed.
Nunn does so much with that boombox and a stare that the block feels empty to me the second he’s gone. The film wants me to feel that loss, and I do.
The three men on the corner are the film’s chorus and its most quoted material. They comment on everything, are wrong about most of it, and the film uses them to establish that the block has an opinion about itself.
Break the fourth wall only to include the reader in an accusation. The slur sequence works because the audience is addressed and given no position to stand in. Do it once. A device this aggressive used repeatedly becomes a style.
Keep your music diegetic when the music is a character’s. It belongs to Raheem, plays when he’s there, and stops when he goes. That makes his absence audible. A color palette can produce a physical state in the reader. Everything in this film is warm and the audience is uncomfortable for two hours without being told why.
The Ending Refuses
Police kill Radio Raheem. Mookie throws a trash can through Sal’s window. The pizzeria burns. The next morning Mookie comes back for his wages and he and Sal argue about money.
The film then closes on two quotations, one from Martin Luther King rejecting violence and one from Malcolm X describing it as intelligent self-defense, presented in sequence without comment.
That’s the decision the whole film exists to make and it’s a refusal. Lee has been asked about it for thirty-five years and has consistently declined to resolve it. That’s the correct answer and was widely treated at the time as irresponsibility.
The question the film leaves is why the property damage was the thing reviewers wanted discussed, in a film where police had just killed a man, and that question has answered itself repeatedly since. The killing itself is staged with a piece of choreography. A chokehold, applied by police, held past the point where the man stops moving, with a crowd watching and shouting at them to stop, filmed in 1989 and requiring no updating whatsoever since.
I find the chokehold almost unbearable to watch. It’s shot without fuss, the crowd screams, the police keep squeezing, and I sit there with my jaw tight waiting for somebody to let go. Nothing about it feels like a movie from 1989.
The crowd’s behavior in that sequence is also carefully staged. They shout, they don’t intervene, several of them are filming nothing because it’s 1989, and the film shows a street watching something it can’t stop.
The Nomination
Best Picture in 1990 went to Driving Miss Daisy. The other nominees were Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot.
This film received two nominations, for Aiello’s supporting performance and for Lee’s screenplay, and won neither. Kim Basinger used the Oscar telecast itself to point out that the best film of the year hadn’t been nominated.
The comparison makes the omission permanent. Driving Miss Daisy is a film in which a white woman’s growth is the arc and a Black man’s patience is the instrument of it, and it won in the same year a film about the same country’s racial arrangement was left off the list.
That pairing is now the standard example when anybody discusses Academy history, and it’s the reason this page exists. A single year produced the clearest possible demonstration of what the institution rewards.
Kim Basinger’s remark during the telecast is the detail that fixed it in the record. A presenter naming the omission live on the broadcast is the kind of thing an institution can’t later characterize as an oversight.
Institutional recognition and quality are weakly correlated and the record is permanent in both directions. This is the most cited example and the citation has outlived the winner. Write the durable thing. Nothing else is under your control.
A work that refuses to resolve its central question will be called irresponsible on release and studied afterward. Both of those are the same property of the work.
When two works from the same year are paired in the record, the pairing becomes an argument neither of them made. That’s how this film’s reputation was partly built, and it’s not something anybody can plan for.
Should you watch Do the Right Thing?
Yes. It’s a 10 because I can’t find a wasted shot, a lazy character or a cheap answer anywhere in it, and because Lee had the nerve to end on two quotations that argue with each other and then walk away. It’s funny and furious, and the heat comes right off the screen. The Academy handed that year to Driving Miss Daisy, and I think the choice looks worse every year people keep watching this film.
