Director: Spike Lee
Screenplay: Joie Susannah Lee, Cinque Lee and Spike Lee, based on a story by Joie Susannah lee
Starring: Alfre Woodward, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris, Spike Lee
Running Time: 115 minutes
Genre: Drama, comedy, coming of age
This semi-autobiographical directed by Spike Lee, and co-written by Lee and his siblings, Cinque and Joie Susannah. The film is set over the spring and summer of 1973 in a tough but close-knit neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, and focuses on nine year old Troy Carmichael (Harris) growing up with four rowdy brothers and her troubled by loving parents: Strict school teacher Carolyn (Woodward), who holds the family together, and ambitious but naive musician Woody (Lindo), who had some success with pop music covers in the past but now wants to concentrate exclusively on his own music.
The film is colourful, lively and is unusually light for a Spike Lee film, however there is still plenty of grit. The neighbourhood is populated with eccentric characters, children play on the stoops and the street, everyone knows what is going on with everyone else and more often than not look out for each other, but it is tough, and there is always a threat of violence, although having said that, it's more likely to be a light punch rather than a gunshot. The film is visually inventive. Troy goes to stay with relatives in the South, which she finds very disturbing and disorientating, and these scenes are filmed in widescreen without anamorphically adjusting the image, which gives it a strange elongated look. The performances are great, Alfre Woodward, Delroy Lindo and Zelda Harris are all superb, and the Carmichael family do feel like a real family, and your left wondering what happens to them after the film. Spike Lee has a part as the neighbourhood glue sniffer Snuffy. It's a loose film, without a strong plot, and feels quite baggy and episodic. It's warm, funny, gritty and real, with a fantastic soundtrack of early '70s soul music.
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