Jungle Fever

Jungle Fever
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 132 m, 1991
Directed by Spike Lee. Stars Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Spike Lee, et al.

Director Spike Lee intended Do the Right Thing to be a fiery critique on the volatile climate of race relations in America’s inner cities, but the film’s scantily defined (almost cartoonish) characters and inappropriately lustrous milieu fleeced it of all credibility. Most critics were somehow shamed into lauding the movie’s fuming overtones, though, and the thing went on to win a plethora of citations from various critics’ circles. (Although it received an Oscar nod for Best Screenplay, it was shut out of the Academy’s consideration for Best Picture, inviting a wobbly Kim Basinger to bemoan the voters’ insensitivity during the televised awards assembly.) Consequently, Do the Right Thing wound up acquiring a substantial following that helped to firmly install Lee as independent cinema’s preeminent ideologue and (conceivably to the media-savvy Lee’s delight) the press’s newest enfant terrible. Lee’s next project, Mo’ Better Blues, wasn’t as communally pertinent (or torturously over-the-top) as Do the Right Thing, but it was just as juvenile and pointlessly slick. Despite the preponderance of flashy duds and wailing horns, it failed to do anything other than bore its audience blind. (You know you’ve suffered the tortures of the damned when you find yourself contending that the cricket-featured, frequently irksome Lee gave the film’s only marginally interesting performance.) Of course, Mo’ Better Blues didn’t garner the accolades that Do the Right Thing did (it didn’t help that nobody bothered to go see it), and I suspect that Lee attributes this to the picture’s lack of incendiary content for he’s back to rabble-rousing form with his latest “joint,” Jungle Fever.

A bespectacled Wesley Snipes plays Flipper, a “loving” husband and father who’s angling to become a senior partner in a lily-white architectural firm. We’re told (or rather he keeps reminding us ad nauseam) that he’s the company’s linchpin, so of course he goes berserk after his oily superiors (Tim Robbins and Brad Dourif) disregard his application for a like-skinned assistant and saddle him with an Italian female temp instead. But the temp, Angie (Annabella Sciorra), has a genial nature (and a nice set of gams), so Flipper tries to make the most of the arrangement. And how! Some Chinese take-out and a few inelegant glances later, he’s boning his coquettish secretary atop his drawing board.

Like a couple of smitten junior high school kids, Flipper and Angie can’t wait to race back to their respective neighborhoods (he lives in Harlem, she in Bensonhurst) and share with their friends the sordid details of their interracial tryst. Under the cover of darkness, Flipper meets up with his main homey, Cyrus (Spike Lee), and gives him the full poop on what it was like to knock boots with a white chick. “Yooz gots de fever,” Cyrus explains. “Jungle fever. De both o’ yooz.” (Yes, he carries on like an idiot, but the film tells us he’s a high school teacher!) “Jungle fever” has something to do with a superficial allure between the races based upon ethnological exaggerations such as the white woman being the epitome of beauty or the black man being a well-endowed fuck machine (with a weird aversion to cunnilingus). Lee obviously thinks he’s blowing the lid off a societal epidemic here, but anyone who’s moved past the eighth grade (and doesn’t use words like “yooz”) most likely would have tossed off this baloney.

Before long, word of the couple’s affair reaches Flipper’s wife, Drew (an achingly shrill Lonette McKee), and she promptly throws the adulterous lug out. I think I hated Jungle Fever the most when wifey comes to the bedroom window, tosses Flipper’s belongings into the street below, and yells, “No penis is between us!” (Of course, a hundred or so neighbors, who have likely grown bored with Arsenio Hall’s incessant “whoof-whoof-whoofing,” gather around to yuk it up over the couple’s spat.) Now, you’d think that Drew would need time after separating from her husband to mull things over in private, but she immediately calls upon her sewing circle of head-cocking, finger-snapping soul sisters to come over and discuss the matter. The scene was purportedly ad hoc, and I don’t doubt it because it has a very awkward, indecisive feel. Worse, the players involved are so embarrassingly sanctimonious in their denunciation of the black man (and those nasty white whores who try to steal them away) that you get the feeling that you’re watching a tawdrier installment of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” (It seems like Spike Lee’s thoughts on white people have been colored by that bloated race hustler Al Sharpton and that silver-tongued anti-Semite Louis “Hitler was a very great man” Farrakhan—the latter being referred to with a good deal of reverence in Do the Right Thing.)

Not one to waste time, Flipper takes Angie to his parents’ house for dinner. Although his mother (Ruby Dee) accepts her, the insufferably straight-laced, anal-retentive “Good Reverend Doctor” (Ossie Davis) takes exception to the fact that his son is dipping in “the white man’s cesspool.” You might think he’d take greater umbrage with his son’s need to play the field while leaving his wife and daughter in the lurch, but his main disgust lies in the fact that Angie is (gasp) white, so he calls her a whore and storms away from the table. Angie lowers her head in shame, but it’s hard to feel sorry for her because she’s an unrepentant home-wrecker and a victim of her own stupid choices. It’s also difficult to tell how we’re supposed to take the “Good Reverend Doctor”: when he creeps Angie out with sordid tales of white plantation owners pleasuring themselves with their black slaves, a heavenly choir rises up on the soundtrack, but we can’t determine if the music is meant to mourn the man’s arrant stupidity or empathize with whatever pain he’s feeling. And what is it about Flipper’s parents that could explain why they named their son after a sea urchin’s appendage—or his brother Gator, fer crissakes?

Gator (Samuel L. Jackson) is a crack addict who’s always hitting up his brother for bread. When Flipper declines Gator’s pleas for dope funds, he wins him over by doing a zany bump and grind, and singing, “I’m a c-c-c-crackhead!” (How many drug abusers do you know that take that sort of pride in such a disabling disease?) When he can’t squeeze another nickel out of his brother, he hits up his mother, but when that well runs dry, he steals his parents’ idiot box. This so incenses the “Good Reverend Doctor” (whom you wouldn’t think even watched TV, what with all its sex and violence) that he draws a revolver and drops Gator dead during one of psychotic jigs. The scene is so utterly absurd that I actually doubled-over in laughter upon seeing it. (With tears streaming down my cheeks, I gripped my heaving belly, and inadvertently dropped a somewhat pricey barrel of popcorn all over the gluey theatre floor.) There isn’t anything wrong with Jackson’s performance (this guy could invite applause from the reading of a William McGonagall poem), but Lee’s conception of the character is babyish crude, and it comes off as a complete put-on. Even more ridiculous is Lee’s representation of a neighborhood crack house as hundreds of brain-dead addicts totter through the crumbling structure like zombies from a Romero flick. Jungle Fever is essentially a foul-mouthed “After School Special” about drug abuse, which really doesn’t make much sense given what the film promotes itself as being.

Another one of the movie’s many subplots involves Angie’s fiancé, Paulie (John Turturro), a nappy-headed flunky who works at his father’s luncheonette and dreams of… ah, who the hell knows? The dump is filled with greasy, Joe Pesci-type Italians that sit around all day sipping egg crèmes and goofing on minorities. Sinatra music plays in the background, and the use of his music to underscore the men’s racist rants is no less offensive than watching the Voice’s picture burn in Do the Right Thing. (And why is it that most of the secondary characters in Lee’s movies never seem to have jobs?) To spite the bigoted jerks, Paulie asks a black girl out on a date, much to chagrin of his father (a scenery-chewing Anthony Quinn), who then beats the shit out of him. Oh, his Negrophobic friends also beat the shit out of him, but this doesn’t stop a battered and bloody Paulie from keeping his date.

By this time, we’ve almost forgotten about Flipper and Angie, which isn’t such a bad thing seeing how their story was going absolutely nowhere anyhow. Lee throws in whatever piece of business he can come up with to take the focus away from the couple because he has no idea how to keep their story moving. But when we are in Flipper and Angie’s company, we can’t figure out why they’re compelled to stay with each other; they have about as much chemistry as Sophia Loren and Burl Ives did in Desire Under the Elms. And whatever nookie they’re enjoying hardly seems worth all the outside interference: they get hassled by a couple of cops that mistake Flipper’s horseplay as attempted rape (it’s a terribly mounted scene), a black waitress (full-figured Queen Latifah) gets on Flipper’s case for bringing a “stringy-haired” white girl into a black neighborhood restaurant, and Angie’s pop (Frank Vincent) beats her mercilessly when he learns of her bedding down a “nigger.” You know, most films are content to give us one abusive father, but Jungle Fever gives us three. And that’s emblematic of the film’s main weakness: it’s too damned busy.

Lee took an unfair lambasting over his last film, Mo’ Better Blues, for wanting to lighten up; I guess black filmmakers are of no use to white critics unless they’re taking on heavy social issues. Well, with Jungle Fever, Lee’s giving them want they all asked for and then some, but he can’t find a cure for “the fever” Flipper and Angie share. He’s too preoccupied with crack fiends, sadistic patriarchs and bad Stevie Wonder songs.

June 14, 1991

I-J

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