Sophomore Slump

School Daze

Written and directed by Spike Lee

At the USA Beacon Hill

SPIKE Lee made one the best movies of 1986, She's Gotta Have It, on a shoestring budget of $125,000 and built a following based on that movie's breezy, brilliant invention and irreverence. The movie allowed Lee to get a major studio, Columbia, to back him on his second feature to the tune of $7,000,000. But with School Daze, Lee may have disappointed a large segment of his newfound fans.

School Daze is a failure, but Lee fails in the way that only a gifted filmmaker car. The movie isn't conceived on a simplistic or amateurish level. Rather, it is simply too ambitious and sprawling, too complicated and confused. Lee has a remarkable visual sense and a truly original way of constructing a story. In She's Gotta Have It, these talents came together to create an innovative, exciting new type of comedy. I doubt, however, that any moviemaker could construct a coherent whole out of the slew of elements Lee attempts to treat in School Daze.

The film takes place on the fictional campus of Mission College, a Black school in the South, during Homecoming week, and the film attempts to capture both the joy and the tumult of Black college life. But Lee has put his movie together as if it were the last movie he would ever be allowed to make it's a confused, vicious, messy film.

The film focuses on the clash between different factions on campus. Antiapartheid activist Vaughn "Dap" Dunlap (Larry Fishburne) is trying to incite Mission to divest. His fight brings him into conflict with Julian "Big Brother Almighty" Eaves (Giancarlo Esposito) leader of the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, who condemns Dap and his "fellas" for their "African mumbo-jumbo."

The campus is further divided between "Wannabees," who wear colored contact lenses and hair weaves and are supposedly trying to look like whites, and the so-called "Jigaboos" who are proud of their Blackness-they take pride in their heritage and the women let their hair grow naturally. Most of this conflict is acted out in a series of catfights between the Gamma Phi women, the Gamma Rays, led by the blond-haired, green-eyed Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) and the Jigaboo women, led by Dap's girfriend Rachel Meadows (Kyme).

Lee takes on all sorts of other kinds of conflict--between Blacks and whites, Blacks and Blacks, men and women, women and women, men and men, young and old and on and on.

More troubling than the vast scope of Lee's subject matter are his stylistic vacillations. At times, Daze is a Scorsese-type realistic exploration of Black life. Then Lee will abruptly change gears from a conflict scene a la Scorsese's Mean Streets into jazzy, upbeat musical numbers that could have been lifted from Little Shop of Horrors.

THERE are moments, however, when Lee's originality and ability shine through. One example is a sex scene between Julian and Jane that is syncopated with a series of blackouts and music. It has a spooky quality and a charged, almost perverse sexuality.

There are also several sequences that are photographed with great sensitivity, especially in several of the slower musical numbers. But Lee never matches the irreverent invention of She's Gotta Have It, and all the narrative hullaballoo detracts from the film's interesting, eerily stylized photography.

If the acting in the movie seems stiff and wooden, it is because the characters are being asked to play paradigms rather than people. Each character typifies a different ideology, so the movie becomes as heavily symbolic as a Brecht musical. The actors slog through the transition from hyper-realstic to symbolic looking rather bewildered.

Especially disappointing is that the musical numbers in a film which is being billed as a comedy/musical, are strangely muted and lifeless. They don't match even the confrontation scenes in vitality.

In addition to airing some touchy intra-racial conflicts, the movie has a good deal of nasty, misogynistic business. Besides the several exaggerated catfights there's an especially disturbing scene where Jane is forced to have sex with Half-Pint, the runt of the Gamma pledges (played unremarkably by Lee himself) as part of his initiation. All the audience has in the way of explanation for this type of slanted portrayal (Lee even stoops to the tired fat-women-are-funny gag) is the film's surreal epilogue contained in the last sequence.

Lee's ambivalence about his message is particularly visible in this final scene which serves as a sort of bizarre postscript. Dap runs into the center of campus yelling "Wake up!" and inexplicably, the major factions come together. Presumably, Lee is instructing his audience to rise above the prejudice, infighting and blindness portrayed in the film. But it's a copout. Lee is trying to distance himself from the harshness of the world he has depicted. But the audience has been bombarded with animosity and anger for two relentless hours. Lee's attempt to depict some sort of reconciliation is too little too late.

I have no doubt that Spike Lee is one of the most promising moviemakers of the last five years. School Daze is a mess, a complex failure which nevertheless demonstrates that the unusual promise of the director of She's Gotta Have It is still there.