Do the Right Thing (1989) Review

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 every position is argued by somebody who has a case, and then declined to adjudicate.

Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture that year. This was not nominated in the category, which is 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 do not move much.

That fixity is what makes the film work. Nobody arrives from outside, nobody leaves, and the pressure has nowhere to dissipate to, which 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, which 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 is not 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, which is 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 is 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.

Everybody Has a Case

The film’s central achievement is that every position in it is argued by somebody the audience can follow.

Sal built the pizzeria, has fed the neighborhood for twenty-five years, is genuinely 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.

Pino is a racist and is also the only person in the family who says out loud that they do not 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 is doing specific work. He sells photographs of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King together, is dismissed by almost everybody, and is the person who puts the picture on the wall at the end.

The Korean grocers are the position most often overlooked. They are 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 does not, 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, which is 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 is 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 is 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 is the point of doing it that way.

Public Enemy’s Fight the Power is used as Raheem’s music and not as score, which means the film’s most famous piece of sound belongs to a character and stops when he is not present.

Bill Nunn also carries 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.

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.

The Ending Refuses

Radio Raheem is killed by police. 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 is the decision the whole film exists to make and it is a refusal. Lee has been asked about it for thirty-five years and has consistently declined to resolve it, which is the correct answer and was widely treated at the time as irresponsibility.

The specific question the film leaves is not whether Mookie was right. It is why the property damage was the thing reviewers wanted discussed, in a film where a man had just been killed by police, and that question has answered itself repeatedly since.

The killing itself is staged with a specific 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.

The crowd’s behavior in that sequence is also staged precisely. They shout, they do not intervene, several of them are filming nothing because it is 1989, and the film shows a street watching something it cannot 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 had not been nominated.

The comparison is what 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 is 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 cannot subsequently characterize as an oversight.

Should you watch Do the Right Thing?

Yes, and it is one of the essential American films. One block, twenty hours, a hundred degrees, every position argued by somebody with a case, a police killing, a burning building, and two quotations at the end that contradict each other and are left to stand.

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