By Vincent Abbatecola
While Spike Lee has excelled in making thought-provoking films that focus on the African-American experience, this has been especially potent when he deals with it in a historical context. With films like Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman, Lee constructed expansive portraits that dove into the challenges that African-Americans faced throughout history.
He makes another such grand accomplishment with his latest movie, Da 5 Bloods: a war drama that’s a tense, heartbreaking, unflinching, and well-acted epic that presents a story of everlasting friendship in the midst of coping with troubled pasts.
The story follows five individuals, Paul (Delroy Lindo), his son David (Jonathan Majors), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.). Paul, Otis, Eddie, and Melvin are Vietnam War veterans who travel back to the country and, along with David, search for the remains of their deceased comrade, as well as a treasure that they buried there during the war.
All four actors exhibit the strength of their friendship that was forged in the carnage of battle and has survived the emotional hardships afterwards. Just from the first scene that they share, we’re provided with an instant view into how deep their camaraderie is as they greet each other, showing us a friendship that’s happy to reunite, despite being in a place that holds some of their worst memories. There’s a bond that these four actors exhibit between their characters that shows how much they’re all in tune with each other’s trauma, trying to help one another as they navigate through familiar territory, both geographically and psychologically.
Despite the tremendous work from the entire cast, the individual who must be pointed out is Lindo. He delivers a blistering performance as a veteran whose life seems to have been consumed by his guilt from the war, showing how much the psychological trauma has built up over the years. There are scenes with him that feel so visceral because of how much Lindo digs into his character’s damaged mind, making it near impossible to pick just one scene that stands out. And, in the couple of scenes where Lindo’s character address the camera, his eyes bore into you to make sure that you’re understanding what he’s saying. While Lindo nails his character’s tough, nothing-to-lose attitude, it’s Paul’s vulnerability that hits you even harder, showing how close he always is to being on the verge of a breakdown, or being prone to impulsive actions that can get him and his friends into trouble. This is a shattering performance that shows what war can do to a person, and there isn’t any doubt that Lindo’s work will leave you emotionally drained.
The screenplay by Lee, Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo, and Kevin Willmott (who cowrote with Lee for the latter’sBlacKkKlansman and Chi-Raq), provide a richly detailed friendship against a backdrop that’s just as detailed with its historical context. While it’s emotional enough to have the friends return to where they were soldiers, it’s just as poignant to have them still be carrying the demons that have haunted them for all of these years, adding another layer of gut-wrenching drama to their arcs. Given the amount of characters on which the story needs to focus, the drama succeeds in providing enough time to build up the friendship. The four main characters don’t go into the jungle until about a third of the way through the movie, so we’re offered a chance to learn about them before they venture into it, which heightens the emotional stakes as we try to compose ourselves when watching to see if they will make it out okay. The movie becomes unpredictable to a point where your concern for the characters intensifies to a near unbearable level, and you begin to question what the writers have in mind as to where they’re going to take you.
Throughout the story, we have several transitions between the present-day and the wartime experiences of the friends’past. An intriguing aspect of the scenes in the past is that the four leads appear as their present-day selves, instead of being replaced by younger actors. By having the four actors appear in the flashbacks as their older selves, we’re given a heightened feeling of them never leaving the war in the past. These are memories that they’ve carried with them since their time in the war, and seeing them transported back to these memories shows, in heart-rending detail, how they keep going back to these memories in their heads.
The camerawork by Newton Thomas Sigel makes transitions between digital cinematography with wide imagery for the present-day scenes that are set in Ho Chi Minh City and the Vietnamese jungles, and a boxy image for the scenes that occur in the past, which are presented in 16 mm reversal film stock. While the present-day scenes capture an abundance of detail for urban Vietnam and the jungles, this creates an effective contrast as we travel to the past, with the square frame being imbued with a graininess that offers a deeper feeling of the war footage that would come out of the battlefields.
Lee is a filmmaker where you can see the passion with which he tackles his stories. It’s a dedication that never wavers, starting out strong and getting stronger as the film goes on, delivering his narrative with a fury that transcends the screen. He creates many strong character moments throughout the film. However, he can also craft some unbearable tension, such as a scene near the beginning of the second half that’s so nerve-racking that I was pretty much grabbing my hair just so that I could have something onto which I can hold in order to manage the stress. He’s a director who knows how to make you feel everything that he wants you to feel, leaving you invested in the dangers and horrors against which the characters find themselves. Lee is one of those filmmakers who makes you remember his messages, and whether he’s subtle or more forward about his themes, they’re effective either way. This creates an impact on the viewer as they watch this deeply human story with characters whose connections are even thicker than blood.
Grade: A