Smooth operator

By Noel Vera

Spike Lee's "Inside Man" isn't the work of an outsider, the kind of
iconoclast filmmaker that Spike used to declare himself to be back
when he did films like "She's Got to Have It" or "Do the Right
Thing." Gone are the deep reds, bright oranges, warm yellows of his
favorite cameraman Ernest Dickerson, replaced by Matthew Labatique's
gray concrete and dim daylight. Gone are the in-your-face close-ups,
the actors addressing the camera head-on while they deliver
hilarious, often profane tirades. At one point Denzel Washington,
playing Detective Keith Frazier, finds himself going down the street
in an effortless glide, but it's more a reminder of or tribute to
the Lee we used to know than a return to old form.

The plot, by newcomer Russell Gewirtz (it's his first big-screen
script), is satisfyingly complex in a shallow way, the quickly
sketched characters in effect enacting a game of high-stakes chess.
A bank robbery staged by one Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and three
other collaborators quickly turns into a hostage drama, and Det.
Frazier is called in as hostage negotiator; a subplot involving
Arthur Case, the bank's Chairman of the Board (Christopher Plummer)
has him hiring mysterious power-broker Madeline White (Jodie Foster)
to protect the contents of a nonexistent safe-deposit box in that
same bank. Plot twists and shadowy deals ensue, as Russell confronts
Frazier and then White, and Frazier begins to realize that this is
more than just a robbery.

Right, right, right. Actually, the script was given to Ron Howard
before he passed on it to do "Cinderella Man" (and oh, what a
sticky, sodden mess he made out of that picture); Lee looking at it
must have sensed he could do something with it, and does--the long
and tortuous plot, conceived and controlled with clockwork precision
by Russell, is mostly a framework on which Lee can hang a series of
biting, often funny encounters between men and women of differing
ethical backgrounds and social standings. An initial meeting between
Frazier and White (Howard can hardly be counted on to get any comic
mileage out of the fact that she's often referred to as "Miss
White") has her immediately condescending to him: "there are matters
at stake here that are a little bit above your pay grade." "Why," he
replies, "don't you just tell the mayor to raise my pay grade to the
right level and problem solved?" Better still is Frazier
interrogating what one of his officers erroneously calls
an "Arab" "I'm a Sikh," the man says; "where's my turban? I won't
talk without my turban." This is New York not as a "melting pot," or
a "salad bowl," but a pocket billiards table--a collection of
multicolored balls bouncing and clashing off of each other in an
endlessly antagonistic game of pool. Unlike Paul Haggis'
cartoonish "Crash," the racial tensions in this film are
understatedly believable: there's an actual crisis happening and
people are trying their level best to do their jobs; in a perfect
world the words "nigger" and "raghead" are never uttered (or
muttered, or overheard), and hearers are never offended--but they
are, they do, and the issue complicates matters endlessly (sometimes
with comic results, as when Frazier and his officers desperately
attempt to translate some surreptitiously recorded Russian
dialogue).

Beyond the racial subtext, Spike gets terrific performances from
Washington, Owens, and, surprisingly, Foster. Clive Owens as
ringleader Russell is only the coolest man in the film;
expressionless, but with a Keatonesque ability to suggest various
levels of emotional heat under his immobile face (it helps that even
if he's masked for most of the film his voice has the same calm yet
evocative efficiency). Jodie Foster (who's never impressed me as an
actress) is directed by Lee (who's never impressed me as a good
director of actresses) to make up for the lack of estrogen in the
picture (otherwise full of women who are either big-breasted, or
hysterical, or posed sexily in bed waiting for their men to come
home)--and she does, several times over. Her Madeline White is an
unapologetic ball-buster, who enjoys making every powerful man in
the picture, from Case to the mayor down to Frazier, squirm in
discomfort; her scenes with Frazier give off more heat and
incidental sparks than Frazier's with his wife (who's all soft,
willing curves, and only seems to love him for his handcuffs).

Washington does excellent work with Lee--he was a charming and
seductive trumpet player in "Mo' Better Blues," a persuasively large-
scale and heroic Malcolm X (it wasn't his performance as Malcolm
that was problematic so much as Lee's respectful view of the man),
and a tremendous ex-convict father in "He Got Game" (perhaps my
favorite Washington performance to date). Here Washington is, of
course, the point man, Lee's taller, handsomer alter ego
representing the ultracompetent black male professional. He works
the case longer than anyone else, longer than anyone else wants him
to; past convenience, past even career advancement, until he gets to
some kind of Chandlerian sense of the truth, of what it's all really
about. But never mind the ostensible secret (which actually isn't
that big of a deal, and rather implausible if you think about it);
it's the fact that Washington's Frazier wants to learn it, and that
Washington puts all his considerable intensity of focus into the
problem that makes the mystery such compelling drama.

"Inside Man" in a way is like Richard Donner's "16 Blocks," a silly
genre exercise with many good things in it that have little to do
with the conventions of the genre (in this case the bank heist
caper), only I'm not in any way suggesting that Donner and Lee are
on the same level (Lee's much more talented, plus he's working with
the better cast). It also bears striking if bizarre resemblance to
Orson Welles' "Mr. Arkadin," with Christopher Plummer as Arkadin,
Washington as a more charming, more intelligent, more troublesome
Van Stratten, and the film is really an excuse to create textures,
moods, odd comic encounters, and a fistful of memorable
performances. Not that I'm saying Lee's anywhere near striking
distance of Welles either but if, like Welles, he sometimes has to
amuse himself with redeeming unpromising material, he could have
done much, much worse.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/9/06)

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