Sal is a tough, no-nonsense guy who basically wants to get along and tend to business. One of his sons is a vocal racist – in private, of course. The other is more open toward blacks. Sal’s ambassador to the community is a likable local youth named Mookie (Spike Lee), who delivers pizzas and also acts as a messenger of news and gossip. Mookie is good at his job, but his heart isn’t in it; he knows there’s no future in delivering pizzas.
We meet other people in the neighborhood. There are Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a kind of everyman who knows everybody; Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a vocal militant; Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), whose boom box defines his life and provides a musical cocoon to insulate him from the world; Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), who is sort of the neighborhood witch. There are the local disk jockey, whose program provides a running commentary, and a retarded street person who wanders around selling photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And then there are three old guys on the corner who comment on developments, slowly and at length.
This looks like a good enough neighborhood – like the kind of urban stage the proletarian dramas of the 1930s liked to start with.
And for a long time during “Do the Right Thing,” Lee treats it like a backdrop for a Saroyanesque slice of life. But things are happening under the surface. Tensions are building. Old hurts are being remembered. And finally the movie explodes in racial violence.
The exact nature of that violence has been described in many of the articles about the film – including two I wrote after the movie’s tumultuous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival – but in this review I think I will not outline the actual events. At Cannes, I walked into the movie cold, and its ending had a shattering effect precisely because I was not expecting it. There will be time, in the extended discussions this movie will inspire, to discuss in detail who does what and why. But for now I would like you to have the experience for yourself, and think about it for yourself. Since Lee does not tell you what to think about it, and deliberately provides surprising twists for some of the characters, this movie is more open-ended than most. It requires you to decide what you think about it.
“Do the Right Thing” is not filled with brotherly love, but it is not filled with hate, either. It comes out of a weary, urban cynicism that has settled down around us in recent years. The good feelings and many of the hopes of the 1960s have evaporated, and today it no longer would be accurate to make a movie about how the races in American are all going to love one another. I wish we could see such love, but instead we have deepening class divisions in which the middle classes of all races flee from what’s happening in the inner city, while a series of national administrations provides no hope for the poor. “Do the Right Thing” tells an honest, unsentimental story about those who are left behind.