There’s a reason why Spike Lee‘s latest, “Highest 2 Lowest” opens with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from “Oklahoma!” playing over swooning aerial views of the high-rises of New York. The oldest of five kids, Lee was not only influenced by his jazz musician father, but he was also his cinephile mother’s movie date. She loved musicals like “Oklahoma!,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” which inspired the Rosie Perez opening of “Do the Right Thing.”
A family friend also took the young Lee to see Akira Kurosawa films.
“I wanted to see people’s heads chopped off, in Samurai films,” Lee told me at Cannes in May, where “Highest 2 Lowest” premiered out of competition. At NYU Film School he came to appreciate Kurasawa’s entire oeuvre. “Rashomon” inspired the differing perspectives in his first feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” which took home the Camera D’Or in 1986.
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“Highest 2 Lowest” marks Denzel Washington‘s fifth collaboration with Lee. “We were both shocked that ‘Inside Man’ was 18 years ago,” said Lee. “So the dynamic duo got back together. Denzel is the world’s greatest living actor. My brother Martin Scorsese wants to say the same thing about [Robert] De Niro. Kurosawa said it about [Toshiro] Mifune. You had these relations where a director and an actor build a catalog of films. And I’m just blessed to be able to do these five films together.” (The four prior films: “Malcolm X,” “Mo’ Better Blues,” “He Got Game,” and “Inside Man.”)
As Lee and Washington both know, Cannes sets up well-reviewed movies for Oscars. That’s why Washington flew to Cannes after the Sunday matinee during his sold-out Broadway run of “Othello” and made it back for Tuesday night’s performance. The actor was surprised when festival director Thierry Fremaux presented him with a Palme d’Or.
At 70, Washington is at the peak of his powers, and if the Oscar gods are smiling, he’ll land his third Oscar (after “Training Day” and “Glory”) for his bravura performance as a record mogul struggling with legacy, morality, and family in “Highest 2 Lowest,” Lee’s assured reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s revered 1963 kidnapping thriller “High and Low.”
By the time Lee got to it, the project had been through the development mill.
Scott Rudin, David Mamet, Chris Rock, and various directors had fussed over a remake. When Washington sent Alan Fox’s reinvention of the Kurosawa classic to Lee, he jumped in, and put it through his computer. The movie has his fingerprints all over it. “It’s respecting the rich material and flipping it,” said Lee, “which jazz has done for the longest time, where you have a standard and then put that barbecue sauce on it.”
Lee cites John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and Miles Davis’ “My Funny Valentine” as examples of jazz reworkings of the classic canon. The movie is awash in contemporary music, from the Scottish Fergus McCready Trio to British singer Ayana Lee, both discovered by Lee on Instagram.
“Highest 2 Lowest” is built on a series of set pieces in which Washington’s multi-millionaire music mogul David King (Stackin’ Hits Records) faces a series of intense confrontations and ethical dilemmas.
In one scene, his oldest friend and chauffeur (Jeffrey Wright) begs for the life of his son (Elijah Wright), who has mistakenly been kidnapped and held for ransom instead of King’s son (Aubrey Joseph). “He’s literally begging on his knees to help to get the money to save his son,” said Lee. “If you have a film where someone has to be pitted against Denzel, you got to bring some weight or you’re gonna get wiped off the screen.”
Wright meets the moment and then some. “People leave the film feeling, ‘What would I do in this situation? Am I going to risk everything I have for a friend’s child?’” said Lee. “It puts the audience in a predicament that Denzel Washington’s character is in. It’s a moral dilemma. It puts them right in the movie.”
The movie’s bravura action sequence (edited by Lee regular Barry Brown) takes King, carrying $17.5 million Swiss francs in a Michael Jordan black bag, onto the 6 train from Borough Hall to the Bronx, as the NYPD chase down a series of mopeds that will intercept him. The starting point: William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” (Lee pays homage to both that film and Stanley Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones” along the way.)
He wanted to show that the kidnapper was a worthy opponent. “I wanted to build up the young felon,” Lee said. “It’s not just some ghetto kid, he’s smart. What is his character going to do? What’s going to make it difficult? The NYPD, they’re following for the drop, so he has to pick a day in the summertime. The drop is going to be in the Bronx, and we’re going to pick a Sunday in August for the Puerto Rican Day Parade, with the [late great] Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra. What song is he going to play? ‘Puerto Rico.’ What’s happening on that Sunday? Oh, the hated Boston Red Sox are coming to Yankee Stadium. That’s going to be mayhem, bedlam, crazy. And that’s the day when David King has to make the drop.”
In a climactic face-off, King and the angry young musician kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) finally meet. “I was confident that there’s going to be a heavyweight fight,” said Lee. “They’re going to go toe to toe, swinging, swinging. Just like sports, the greatest games are ones that are won in the last second, the last inning. You want to have that confrontation of two actors going at it, throwing haymakers. Now, I would never cast someone lesser in those scenes with Denzel, and he’s just clobbering somebody, and there’s no tension.”
They’re also expressing alternate world views, which is what the movie is about. “It’s generational,” said Lee. “You got the the old Gunslinger, and the rookie trying to take down the king. That’s just classic Shakespeare. Then it’s also music too. At the end, Denzel says, ‘Your music, I can’t.’ He’s known as having the best ears in business. ‘You guys are doing your thing, but that’s not my thing.’”
Alas, A24 will only play “Highest 2 Lowest” exclusively in theaters from August 15 to September 5, when it hits streaming on AppleTV+. This is a kinetic big-scale spectacular that needs to be seen on the big screen.
