For a Black man with power, the belief is that he somehow cheated his way to the top. The expectation is also that he’s one bad move away from crashing back down to Earth. Expectations are different for successful Black people. They must navigate waters that others simply don’t have to. Denzel Washington’s character David King in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is the top music mogul in the world. He’s the man with “the best ears in the business”. But he knows others are looking for any crack in the armor to take it all away from him, and that justifiable paranoia is what fuels the thorny moral dilemma he faces in Lee’s virtuoso reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s neo-noir classic, High and Low.
It’s been twenty years since Lee and Washington, to my mind the best director/actor combo working today, delivered another genre classic, the heist thriller Inside Man. By God, there should be a law that they don’t make us wait this long again. As great as they are individually, they are miles better together . One elevates the other. They defy simple definitions, traditional labels. They are as perfect together as Kurosawa was with his muse, the great Toshiro Mifune. And just as High and Low was a knotty moral drama presented as a police procedural, Highest 2 Lowest explores race, greed, fame, class, and so much more in the guise of a New York crime thriller. The ease with which Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox transplant the core themes of Kurosawa’s film, and American author Evan Hunter’s book King’s Ransom, into a contemporary context is intoxicating.
As usual, Lee shows off his beloved New York in all of its beautiful, diverse glory, with cinematographer Matthew Libatique glorifying the city’s skylines, its people, the culture, the hustle and bustle in sweeping shots. Only Lee would DARE to do it to the sounds of Oklahoma! track “Oh What A Beautiful Morning”. For any other director it’d be sacrilege, but Lee makes it work. And he makes up for it with ease, dropping one head-nodding track after another. Even when the musical score is on the nose, like droppin’ James Brown’s “The Big Payback” during a night drive to get some…well, pay back, it’s exactly what you want to hear in the moment you want to hear it.
The basic contours of Kurosawa’s film are there, but Lee and Washington have no qualms about making Highest 2 Lowest their own. In fact, the film gets better the more that they do. Those familiar will know that Washington’s mogul David King is feeling the pinch. He’s built his record label Stackin’ Hits into a juggernaut of the music industry. But he sold his stake in it and is now trying to buy it back, feeling the weight of his legacy bearing down on him. That’s put him in an economic crunch and, as King well knows, also puts him in a place of weakness that others will look to exploit. The camera swoops in on King’s towering Brooklyn penthouse, filled with Basquiat and Frederick J. Brown paintings and other mementos of incalculable worth. King lives there with his beautiful wife,Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and their son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). King’s right-hand-man and chauffeur Paul, played with quiet fury by Jeffrey Wright, is basically a family member. Paul’s son Kyle (Elijah Wright) is, as well, joining Trey for a summer basketball camp run by NBA all-star Rick Fox.
While King and Paul are thick as thieves, the vast gulf in their social class and economic status is made painfully clear when a caller claims to have kidnapped Trey. The police show up fast enough to make Flavor Flav’s head spin, and with enough force to mount an insurgency. King will do anything, pay anything to get his son back and the cops are all for it. But when it’s revealed that Trey is okay and it was actually Kyle who was taken, suddenly King is dead set against putting himself at financial risk to save the child of his closest confidante. The police also look at Paul with the kind of distrust that someone of King’s wealth and power never has to endure.
There’s perhaps no better actor at playing a conflicted scoundrel than Denzel Washington. As King argues with himself, invoking the names of R&B greats for wisdom, Washington delivers a tour de force performance. King is being hit from all sides, with the social media landscape (Black Twitter gets a shout out) eager to either paint him as a savior or a villain, depending on his choice. Paul, and others, urgently engage with King to do the right thing. But what does “right” even mean in a situation like this? As King himself notes, it’s all a matter of perspective.
While Denzel flexes his dramatic muscles, Lee gets to show a cinematic verve that puts other filmmakers much younger than him to shame. This is highlighted by an astounding chase sequence aboard a speeding subway train packed with rowdy Yankees fans (Nick Turturro is uproariously crazed here) screaming how much Boston sucks. Highest 2 Lowest is packed with appreciation for New York’s cultural complexity, including a diversion to a Puerto Rican parade that manages to heighten the intensity rather than bog it down.
Kurosawa is often imitated but rarely duplicated. Lee is smart enough not to even try, preferring to use style and his personal cinematic language to make Highest 2 Lowest his own. Sometimes his choices don’t work, like a couple of odd scene transitions, but Lee has the nuts to make the bold moves that others won’t. Directed by Lee with the brazen confidence that comes with experience, and performed by a revitalized Denzel, Highest 2 Lowest puts every other American crime movie this year to shame.
Highest 2 Lowest opens in theaters on August 15th.
