The sweltering heat of summer pushes the stretched-thin tensions of a New York neighborhood to a breaking point. Such a description applies to Spike Lee’s mainstream breakthrough, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, and also to Summer of Sam, the filmmaker’s last movie before the turn of the millennium. The more the latter goes on, the more you see the proverbial shadow of the former, which explored many of the same ideas but with more focus, potency.
The escalating temperatures are one reason the characters of Summer of Sam are so keyed-up. The other is a series of murders. The movie is set in 1977, mostly in an Italian American-dominated segment of the Bronx. It begins at the start of the killing spree of the to-be-identified David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old loner driven so crazy by the unrelenting barking of a neighbor’s perpetually tied-up black lab that he takes out his rage on locals, most of them dark-haired women, with a .44 caliber gun. The film doesn’t approach the crimes from the familiar dramatic vantage point of a police procedural — anything like an official investigation is mostly kept in the margins — but as a conduit into the lives of several characters, for whom the anxieties incurred by the murders will either cause or exacerbate already existing problems. (The movie will also invoke the New York City Blackout and winning Yankees season of that summer to add to the high-emotion, high-passion atmosphere.)
Of most concern in Summer of Sam is Vinny (John Leguizamo), a hip-wiggling hairdresser in the George Roundy mold who seems almost addicted to stepping out on his waitress wife, Dionna (Mira Sorvino). There’s also Ritchie (Adrien Brody), an old friend of Vinny’s back in the neighborhood after some time away who dreams of becoming a punk-rock star. Discreetly, he makes money performing at and soliciting sex from visitors of a nearby gay theater; his new girlfriend, Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), whom most people condescend to as the neighborhood slut, doesn’t walk away the better she gets to know him.
Adrien Brody and John Leguizamo in Summer of Sam.
The killings are a temporary wake-up call for Vinny. After a near-brush with Berkowitz, he’s reminded of life’s preciousness and how much he’s potentially squandering his own with the way he’s been acting. But his sexual compulsions, in some ways paralleling the killer’s homicidal ones, can only be quelled for so long. Ruby and the mohawked Ritchie come to be representative of how easily outcasts can become targets in times of tension and distrust; it’s not long before some macho guys in the neighborhood start mounting their own de-facto investigation of the murders. They place Ritchie at the top of their suspect list, chiefly made up of neighborhood rejects who might not have any concrete evidence against them besides having so-called evil eyes. He’s a killer, to their eye, because he so noisily refuses conformity.
Lee keeps things visually busy; intense montages set to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and us-against-the-world stylizations of dance-floor fun are among the more memorable tricks up his sleeve. (The latter musical cue is one of many inspired ones thrown in in the course of the movie, which is so committed to being of the time that even what’s maybe the best scene in the film — two characters, fighting while echtly dressed in their Studio 54 best in a graveyard — can’t resist having ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” blare from their convertible’s speakers.)
The two-and-a-half-hour-long Summer of Sam overly meanders for a movie with such thinly drawn characters. (Their papery quality belies the flashiness of the performances.) The diffuseness is appealing for a while, mostly because Lee is consistently good at immersing viewers in the milieus he creates. But it wears on you. When the climax nondiegetically repurposes the earlier-used “Baba O’Riley,” it feels like a stand-in for an explosiveness the movie’s preceding shagginess has already extinguished.
Peterson Reviews 