GREEK MASHUP
‘Chi-Raq’ transports ‘Lysistrata’ to a Chicago overrun by gang wars
Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq” is likely to make a lot of people angry — not for what it says about Chicago’s homicide statistics, especially among young African-Americans, but for how it says it.
Director and co-writer Lee took on an existing script by Kevin Willmott (“C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America”). Then together, they relocated this brash update on the ancient Greek play “Lysistrata” to 21st-century Chicago.
Its prologue is all business, indicating nothing of the raunchy sex comedy lurking in wait. As Nick Cannon’s “Pray 4 My City” fills the soundtrack with mourning, lyrics pop up on the screen: “Please pray for my city/ Too much hate in my city/ Too many heartaches in my city/ But I got faith in my city.”
The “faith” part doesn’t come easily. “Chi-Raq” includes in its opening minutes screens full of stats unfavorably comparing Chicago’s murder rate to American lives lost in Iraq and Afghani-
stan. It’s a city of “pain, misery and strife,” as our straight-to-the-camera narrator, Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson), tells us. And, he says, “we can’t take this much more.”
Our host relays the story as a mythic flashback about a “gorgeous Nubian sister,” Lysistrata — who, in this telling, is an Englewood stunner played by Teyonah Parris.
After the stark overture, Lee revs up his deliberate, risky, often entertaining disorientation of the audience. Though frustrating and wildly uneven, “ChiRaq” also ranks as Lee’s most interesting project in nearly a decade since the slick thriller “Inside Man” and the excellent Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO, “When the Levees Broke,” both from 2006.
Dolmedes fillsusinonthe context. The Aristophanes comedy “Lysistrata” (411 B.C.) was about a sex strike waged by Athenian women and designed to frustrate their lunkhead warriors into halting the Peloponnesian War. It was written in rhymed verse. “Chi-Raq” will do likewise, Dolmedes says.
At times, the movie feels like a nervy grad-school collaboration between theater and film departments, but with access to really good actors.
The South Side women are fed up with the carnage caused by a war between rival gangs — the Trojans (Wesley Snipes is their oneeyed leader, Cyclops) and the Spartans (Cannon’s character, a rising rapper with a gangbanger’s résumé, goes by the name Chi-Raq).
Lysistrata gets wind of a sex strike — a nonfictional example from recent history, led by Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee. So why not try it in the bloody city by the lake?
The abstaining warrior Lysistrata persuades women, many of them grieving mothers with dead children, to forget their blood feuds and band together. No more action for anyone
At times, the movie feels like a nervy grad-school collaboration between theater and film departments, but with access to really good actors.
until the men put down the guns.
“Even the hos are noshows,” one man complains. The doltish, panicky Chicago mayor (D.B. Sweeney, resembling a long-lost cousin of the Daleys) blusters, while Lysistrata and company take over the armory in protest.
Many more characters and a dozen different styles jostle for screen time in this crowded movie. Jennifer Hudson has too little to do as the woman whose preteen daughter falls victim to the latest stray bullet in the gang war.
John Cusack portrays a thinly veiled version of the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Church, who rails against America’s love affair with firearms and offers a reward for the killer of the latest slain child.
Angela Bassett’s Miss Helen, the conscience of Englewood, owns a bookstore and, in a standout scene, encounters a smiling but predatory insurance salesman at her front gate.
For every sharp, arresting sequence, such as the early, deadly shootout involving gang members at a nightclub (peppered with a flurry of online and on-screen taunts), another scene in “Chi-Raq” reflects a massive misjudgment.
At one point, Lysistrata seduces, and then turns the tables on, a venal, sexstarved Confederate-loving military officer. The humor — the officer, sporting Confederate-flag underwear, mounts his Civil War cannon in a suggestive manner — is painfully clunky, and the setup makes zero sense, even for a multidirectional satire: a Confederate in Chicago? Huh?
The tonal change-ups, with swings between the horrors of street violence and phallic sight gags, are likely to propel some viewers right out of the theater.
“Lysistrata” has never been an easy classic to adapt, though everyone keeps trying. We’ve had everything from “Lysistrata” as a movie musical set in 19th-century Kansas (“The Second Greatest Sex,” 1955) to Miami-set film versions to countless stage attempts the world over.
The idea at the center of “Lysistrata” is so elemental and so strong, yet the marriage of serious points delivered through antic, comic methods is never smooth.
The stage-trained actors fare best; Jackson, Bassett and the “Dear White People” standout Parris find a performance pitch that makes sense and respond to the material’s warring impulses.
Cusack’s scenes are compelling in a completely different style. But Lysistrata herself tends to get lost in her own story. Had the script begun on a broadly comic note and then grown progressively more sobering, rather than seesawing throughout, “Chi-Raq,” I suspect, might have established more buy-in from audiences.
Many viewers may approach Lee’s film in a defensive crouch. Chicagoans of various political stripes were wary of Lee’s movie for months before, during and after this past summer’s shoot. They’re wary of any movie that treats these subjects as a source of satire, dark or light, purposeful or frivolous.
“Chi-Raq” traffics in all those sorts of comedy. People tend to forget just how wonderfully unpredictable Lee’s work can be — “Do the Right Thing” on the high end, “School Daze” in the middle and satires such as “Bamboozled” toward the low end.
If “Chi-Raq” disarms even a small percentage of those who see it and provokes any reflection about a gun culture, the uses of satire and the plight of a sadly emblematic city, it was worth the effort — however mashed-up the results.