Jungle Fever

Jungle Fever is a powerhouse -- hotly erotic, brutally funny and profoundly disturbing. But it's not flawless; hell, it's often infuriating. Lee still traffics in stereotypes, still dodges some of the thornier questions he raises and still unashamedly stacks the deck to prove his point. You can pick apart Jungle Fever till you drop, but it's as harrowing and authentic a look at the inner city as film has given us.

With the help of the gifted cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, Lee paints the lifestyles of the two lovers in quick, broad strokes. The brownstone where Flipper lives with his wife, Drew (Lonette McKee) -- a buyer for Bloomingdale's -- and their ten-year-old daughter, Ming (Veronica Timbers), is on Striver's Row, a district that houses the elite of African American professionals. While Flipper and Drew make love upstairs, a newsboy drops the New York Times at their door.

Angie's lifestyle in Bensonhurst is decidedly less chic. Home from work, Angie cooks and takes foulmouthed abuse from her widowed father, Mike (Frank Vincent), and her two grown brothers, Charlie (David Dundara) and James (Michael Imperioli). There's no Times for the Tuccis. The local candy store, run by Angie's sweet-natured boyfriend Paulie Carbone (John Turturro), doesn't carry the paper because Paulie's raging bigot father, Lou (hammed to the hilt by Anthony Quinn), says it doesn't sell.

Flipper and Angie meet when she is assigned to his firm as a temp. Though Flipper has been denied partnership by his two white bosses (grossly caricatured by Tim Robbins and Brad Dourif), he is clearly the firm's strongest hand. For Angie, Flipper is something new -- both an educated, successful man and the mythic black stud. For Flipper, Angie is the mythic white beauty the media have teased him with since puberty. On the soundtrack, eleven new songs from Stevie Wonder catch these moods remarkably. After a few late-night takeout dinners at the office, Flipper and Angie go at each other right on his drafting table.

Curiosity has gotten the better of them. Or at least that's what Flipper tells his pal Cyrus, a teacher played with sly humor by Lee himself. "Both of you have jungle fever," says Cyrus. Whatever it is, it nearly wrecks their lives. Learning of her husband's affair, Drew throws Flipper out. At a female "war council" -- sure to be much quoted and discussed -- Drew gets some graphic advice from other wronged sisters on the black man's attraction to light-skinned women. Angie not only loses her home, she is beaten and disowned by her father, who calls her a "nigger lover." She and Flipper take an apartment together and try to work out their feelings. Snipes (New Jack City) and Sciorra (True Love) are both terrific, adding depth to characters conceived as symbols. One night, while the two playfully trade punches and kisses outside, two cops (the same two who murdered Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing) drive up and, assuming rape, nearly kill Flipper. Though the moment is traumatic, Lee never follows through on how this example of racism in action might have brought the couple closer together.

Instead, Lee keeps railing about the destructiveness of interracial relationships based solely on sexual myths. Lee won't allow Flipper and Angie's relationship to deepen into love, either because it doesn't fit his thesis or because he's unwilling to do that much soul-searching. "In the end," Flipper tells Angie, "this was about white pussy and a big black dick." Nothing in Sciorra's luminous performance suggests such a limited view. She gives Angie a poignancy that pierces the heart, especially when she returns in silence to her father's house. The sense of defeat in that scene has a chilling desolation.

But if Lee shuts off Angie, he opens up to Gator, Flipper's crackhead older brother. As played by Samuel L. Jackson, a blistering actor in an unforgettable role, Gator is a figure of charm and menace. Flipper is tired of paying for Gator's habit, and their rigid father, the Good Reverend Dr. Purify -- Ossie Davis in fine bluster -- has barred him from his home. It's their mother, Lucinda (the great Ruby Dee), who passes Gator a C-note in exchange for a hug. Lucinda blinds herself to the fact that the money will get Gator and his woman Viv (Halle Berry) back on the pipe. Flipper closes his eyes, too, until Viv -- a crack whore -- encounters Flipper walking Ming to school. "I'll suck your dick good for five dollars," she tells Flipper, who pulls Ming away in horror.

Lee has drawn fire for not dealing with drugs in his previous films. Now the time is right. Flipper tracks his brother to a crack den called the Taj Mahal. There, in a ruined apartment building, sits an army of casualties, of different races and colors, sucking frantically on glass pipes. It's an indelible, devastating vision of hell.

The film ends in a tragic act of violence that links the plot strands. Lee regards the fever -- whether induced by lust, drugs, religious fanaticism or bigotry -- as a form of blindness. Only when the fever breaks can we see the jungle clearly, as a place where tolerance for racism is on the rise and justice is just another liberal vanity getting tossed on the bonfire. What Flipper sees makes him cry out in pain, and Lee lets that cry ring long and loud. Lee isn't the only artist voicing these concerns. But he's one of the very few to make them pungently vivid. Jungle Fever is not to be underestimated or ignored.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 607

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(Posted: Dec 8, 2000)