A pair of new films, directed by filmmakers from Brooklyn, reflects the resilience of the noir-ish New York crime thriller – the genre of The Naked City (1948), Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The French Connection (1971) – but turns out to reveal something else as well: the continuing influence of Akira Kurosawa. With Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee offers a remake of one of Kurosawa’s gendaigeki or stories of contemporary Japan, High and Low (1963), about a kidnap gone wrong, while Darren Aronofsky, in the frenetic wrong-man caper Caught Stealing, revisits his formative relationship with a Kurosawa character, the pincered lone wolf or ronin from the jidaigeki or period piece Yojimbo (1961), which Pauline Kael hailed as the ‘first great shaggy-man movie’.
Lee was born in Atlanta in 1957, and raised in Cobble Hill and Fort Greene. As a student at NYU film school, he made a noir-tinged short, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), which won a Student Academy Award, then worked on a feature script, an autobiographical story about his experiences as a bike courier, Messenger. When that project faltered, he turned to an idea he considered ‘more commercial’ but easier to bring off. She’s Gotta Have It (1986), about a young black woman, Nola, and her three lovers, was shot on 16mm over the course of twelve days, with the upstairs of a Fort Greene restaurant serving as Nola’s flat. Lee has said that his ‘hero’ was a recent NYU alumnus, Jim Jarmusch, who had followed the micro-budget Permanent Vacation (1980), about a wandering hipster in downtown New York, with the delicate comic road movie Stranger than Paradise (1984), which won a prize at Cannes. But from the start, he insisted that Kurosawa, whose films Lee started watching at NYU, was his ‘master’.
Kurosawa’s introduction to American film culture came in the early 1950s, when Rashomon, in which a rape and murder is told from conflicting perspectives, beat Renoir and Bresson to the Golden Lion at Venice. It introduced a potent new style, kinetic yet stately, and highly innovative in technique. The New York Times welcomed the ‘import’ as essential viewing for ‘suspense fans and students of moviecraft’ – instantly identifying Kurosawa’s appeal – adding that, ‘since we can’t say it in Japanese – bravo!’ There followed the humanist drama Living (1952), the ‘Eastern Western’ The Seven Samurai (1954), the Macbeth retelling Throne of Blood (1957) – a run that came to an end with Yojimbo, its sequel Sanjuro (1962) and High and Low. For the next decade, his fortunes dipped. When Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas learned that Kurosawa was struggling to fund his next film, they lobbied Fox to put up $1.5m for international rights. The result, Kagemusha (1980), won the Palme d’Or, and the reverberations were felt in the city where he had always been revered. A profile by Lilian Ross in a December 1981 issue of the New Yorker begins with Kurosawa arriving at JFK, to launch a complete retrospective at Japan House. He is interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, photographed by Arnold Newman for the cover of his forthcoming Knopf autobiography, toasted by filmmakers, among them Sidney Lumet, who remarks that he and Dreyer are the only directors from the sound era who ‘changed movies’.
That was the context in which Lee was formed as both admirer and disciple. While developing the idea for She’s Gotta Have It in late 1984, he consciously adopted a version of the Rashomon framework – one story, multiple perspectives. He also borrowed a technique from Kurosawa’s film which he considered ‘vicious’ – a favoured term of praise – ‘where he went from a LONG SHOT TO A CLOSE using five or six DISSOLVES’. While Lee wanted to recreate the ‘energy’ of Godard’s Breathless, he still saw Rashomon as the central reference point. Lee’s friend, the Brooklyn-based writer Nelson George, argued that Kurosawa wasn’t just an influence on his storytelling and visual style. There was also ‘his presentation of Japanese culture in all its centuries-old richness’. In an interview, Lee said that he wanted to do for African-Americans what ‘Fellini’s done for Italians and Kurosawa’s done for the Japanese’.
Since then, Lee has created a rich if uneven body of work, portraying ordinary, frequently middle-class African-American experience, at home and abroad, in topical drama (Do the Right Thing, Get on the Bus), musicals (School Daze, Chi-raq), period pieces (Crooklyn, Red Hook Summer, BlacKkKlansman), satire (Bamboozled), romantic comedy (Jungle Fever, She Hate Me), biopic (Malcolm X) and war films (The Miracle of St Anna, Da 5 Bloods). In his new film, Highest 2 Lowest, he takes on African-American wealth and success, and the resentment it inspires. Denzel Washington plays David King, a famous New York music-industry impresario who is trying to buy up shares in his company, Stackin’ Hits Records. Having agreed to sell up and retire, he has become convinced that regaining control and working with new songwriters is the only way to save the future of music, or perhaps just his own legacy, from AI, advertising and bad taste. (His competitor has the name of another Kurosawa crime movie: Stray Dog.) Then he receives a phone call: his teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped from a basketball camp. It turns out the boy taken was actually Trey’s friend, Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of David’s old friend and assistant Paul (Jeffrey Wright), complicating the matter of whether to pay the $17.5m ransom. As his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) says, ‘David, it’s so much money.’ On the other hand, Kyle is David’s godson, and the eyes of the world are watching, or will be.
Lee has visited territory of this kind before, in the sentimental drama He Got Game (1998), in which Washington played a convicted killer given a temporary release and promised a shorter jail term if he can persuade his son, a hot basketball player, to take his talents to the governor’s alma mater. That predicament, however improbable, worked well enough in its own terms. The goal and the stakes were clear. In Highest 2 Lowest, the contending factors in David’s dilemma are foggily presented. Conversations about moral obligation and media – and social-media – perception go round in circles. It doesn’t help that instead of expressing himself plainly to relatives and colleagues, David has a tendency to pucker his lips, clap, emit gales of excessive laughter while holding forth in slogans, near-jokes, failed aphorisms, elusive spatial metaphors. There’s a reflection on how people talk about what’s ‘on the table’ but never what’s ‘under the table’. At one point, he says, ‘I understand. I overstand.’ After David seems to agree with Paul that he has never asked him for ‘anything’, he suddenly notes that he’s always being asked to put this ‘on top of that, on top of this, on top of that, on top of this, on top of that and this and that.’ One is caught between annoyance at Washington’s showboating and sympathy at how little he has been given to work with.
There’s no doubting the sincerity of Lee’s admiration for Kurosawa. The credits of Highest 2 Lowest hail ‘the master’. On a couple of occasions, he uses Kurosawa’s ‘wipe’ cut, whereby the new image moves across the screen (here it’s being pulled by the Stackin’ Hits logo). Otherwise, beyond the repurposed narrative structure, the influence is hard to detect, in positive terms at least. High and Low achieved some of its strongest effects in areas where the new film most clearly falters: in the handling of the widescreen frame, by turns clumsily blocked and yawningly empty; in the use of the score (by Howard Drossin), which is ladled over almost every scene; and in the casting of supporting roles, which is uniformly counterintuitive, from Jeffrey Wright as the Muslim reformed felon Paul to Dean Winters as an inexplicably short-tempered detective to the former Celtics and Lakers small forward Rick Fox playing himself.
Perhaps in seeking to avoid direct comparison, the film – or Alan Fox’s script – makes a number of regrettable divergences. Highest 2 Lowest in fact derives less benefit from the ingenuity of Kurosawa’s film than looser acts of homage: the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. In the original film, the confusion over which boy has been taken is almost immediately discovered. Here a whole day passes, though it’s unclear why. The essential structure is replicated: a long section in the apartment where King confers with the police, the ransom handover (easily the film’s most dynamic sequence), then the hunt for the culprit. But Kurosawa’s telling involves dogged investigation, a descent from the executive’s tower into the slums he overlooks, while in Lee’s version the procedural component is replaced by the most straightforward of vigilante missions, in which a coincidence, occurring soon after the ransom handover, takes King and Paul to the kidnapper’s front door. Given the film’s regime of dawdling and obfuscation, the mystery is solved with preposterous abruptness, though a chunky epilogue follows. (Albert Hughes, who directed Menace II Society with his brother Allen, once told Henry Louis Gates that Lee ‘needs to go to ending school’.)
It’s as a topical polemic that Lee’s remake is most confused. The film essentially treats Kurosawa’s story of social inequality in Yokohama as the vehicle for a selective attack on progress, propelled by a sense that the integrity embodied by its mogul-hero – a figure with strong resemblances to Lee himself – is under-represented in the world at large. David goes on about a hallowed past while taking numerous swipes at technology. Yet he lives in a recently gentrified – in fact, recently named – Brooklyn district, Dumbo, and uses iPods and Beats headphones. There’s a cameo from the Gen Z Tik Tok star Ice Spice. And the film opens with a series of shots that swoop towards David’s balcony, a sequence that lasts the entirety of ‘O What a Beautiful Morning’, not only typical of the film’s perversity and lack of rigour but clearly facilitated by drones.
Aronofsky was a seventeen-year-old high-school student from Manhattan Beach, south Brooklyn, when he attended a showing of She’s Gotta Have It at the Regent’s Plaza off Flatbush Avenue. ‘I had never seen anything like it’, he recalled, and recently described his exposure to Lee’s film as ‘probably the reason I’m a filmmaker’, shared Brooklyn origins seeming immediately more important than their racial or ethnic differences. Like Lee, Aronofsky went to film school, made a short, Supermarket Sweep (1991), that was recognised at the Student Academy Awards, then tried to make a personal film (Dreamland, set in Coney Island), before regrouping and making something simpler. He is almost exactly twelve years younger than Lee, and his New York-set debut, Pi (1998), shot in black-and-white and 16mm, using part of a warehouse in Bushwick, came out almost exactly twelve years later – marking the arrival of the latest twenty-nine-year-old fledgling Brooklyn filmmaker.
If Lee was the filmmaker that galvanized Aronofsky – though he recently said Jarmusch was ‘the other one who got me going’ – then the inspiration, the filmmaker he always named first, was Kurosawa. Aronofsky has said he watched the scene in Yojimbo, in which Sanjuro puts in an order for ‘two coffins – no, maybe three’, so often that he wore out the VHS tape. Pi drew on Kurosawa’s film for its story of Max Cohen, a lonely Jewish mathematician caught between rival factions, representatives of a Wall Street firm who believe that a formula Max is developing can help pick stocks and a group of Hassidim convinced he will reveal the mysteries of Yahweh.
By then, Kurosawa should have been an outmoded enthusiasm. Aronofsky himself pointed to a younger Japanese filmmaker, Shinya Tsukamoto, the director of Tetsuo (1989) and Tokyo Fist (1996), who had gone out ‘in a low-tech way’ and created his own ‘cyberpunk’ style. But he didn’t consider Tsukamoto strong enough as a narrative filmmaker, and that wouldn’t do for a self-described ‘story junky’, so Kurosawa’s influence lingered, as it did for others. When Pi came out in July 1998 – Kurosawa died the following month – Jarmusch was getting ready to shoot a samurai film, Ghost Dog, in New York and New Jersey. (Kurosawa was thanked in the credits.) Alexander Payne mentioned him whenever he could – ‘He tells a good story, and he’s not afraid of anything’ – and was trying to make an Ikiru update which eventually mutated into an adaptation of Louis Begley’s novel About Schmidt. Paul Thomas Anderson paid homage to Stray Dog (1949), about a cop who loses his gun, in the John C. Reilly strand of Magnolia (1999).
Aronofsky – again like Lee – used an independent debut as a springboard to more commercial filmmaking without entirely abandoning his ragged roots. His new film – his ninth to date – Caught Stealing – might be seen as a Pi rerun, less cerebral, more visceral, with the pained, nebbish Sean Gullette replaced by the somewhat goofily gorgeous Austin Butler. It takes place in the same time and place, Chinatown and the East Village in the late 1990s, and deploys the Yojimbo model of a lone wolf caught between competing interests, in this case garden-variety movie criminals angling for the same stash of loot. Hank, a former high-school baseball star working as a bartender, receives unwanted attention first from a pair of Russian henchmen then from a pair of Yiddish-speaking black-hatted Jews (Vincent D’Onofrio and Leiv Schreiber) after he agrees to cat-sit for his neighbour, the mohawked Cockney Russ (Matt Smith). Hank’s only way out, until Russ returns, is to play them off against each other.
Like Highest 2 Lowest, the film was shot on the streets of New York last year by the cinematographer Matthew Libatique, though Aronofsky expresses his disdain for the present more implicitly than Lee does, with a grimy story set in a mythologised recent-ish past, before 9/11, Bloomberg and the dot-com-crash. (Hank’s annoying neighbour, Duane, routinely described as working in finance, insists, ‘I build websites.’) Even allowing for the shared declinist element – manifested as invective in one film, nostalgia in the other – their normative versions of modern New York, of what gives the city its vitality and meaning, are plainly divergent. In both films, the initial status quo, before the intrusion of urban violence, is largely associated with pleasure and contentment, but where King owns a vast duplex penthouse and Stackin’ Hits is based in a midtown skyscraper, Hank lives in a walk-up just off Avenue A and works in a dive bar. Aronofsky set Pi in Chinatown because it had so far escaped gentrification, and he gets the same frisson here, albeit via period reconstruction rather than location shooting. The film opens with a jibe at Mayor Giuliani’s law against communal dancing in bars, whereas Highest 2 Lowest leaves us in no doubt that David’s heyday was ‘the early 2000s’. (The disparity seems to reflect private tastes: Lee lives in a townhouse on East 63rd Street, whereas Aronofsky recently said, ‘I haven’t been above 56th Street in like 30 years’.)
Charlie Huston, adapting their own 2004 novel, receives the film’s sole screenwriting credit, but many of the changes from the source material were commissioned by the director. (Others were necessitated by urban development, such as the ongoing renovation of the East River Park.) The action has been moved two years earlier, and there are visits to Coney Island, as featured in both Pi and Aronofsky’s second film Requiem of a Dream (2000). The crazed Hassidim were cowboys in Huston’s novel. The corrupt detective in collusion with the Russians, a white man in the novel, is now, like the main trader in Pi, an African-American woman (Regina King). Griffin Dunne, the star of Martin Scorsese’s frantic comic thriller about downtown Manhattan, After Hours (1985), appears as Hank’s boss, and Hank’s girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a sculptor in Huston’s original, is a paramedic, an allusion to the next modern-day film that Scorsese made in the city, Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
Aronofsky, in talking about Kurosawa, has tended to emphasise his action-director credentials and the presentation of the ronin figure. The coffins quip, he claims, is the ‘first hero one-liner’, a precursor to ‘Hasta la vista, baby’, and Caught Stealing is a reminder of why Kurosawa’s example has proved so potent and malleable. He was invested in the archetypal figures and structures to which the American imagination was also drawn, and could serve as a bridge between the genre filmmaking of the studio era, as represented by John Ford, and the more cynical or knowing sensibility of New Hollywood and independent cinema. Aronofsky’s film is unabashedly throwaway, content to play around with familiar tropes and a scrappy plot. Hank’s one-liners do not reach the Sanjuro level. ‘You’ve got my number’, Yvonne tells him. ‘You’ve got my hat’, he replies. Aronofsky’s contribution to the iconography or mythology of the hero came in his earlier work, with Max in Pi, Harry the wide-eyed heroin addict (Jared Leto) in Requiem for a Dream, and Randy ‘the Ram’ (Mickey Rourke) in The Wrestler (2008). Still, for a director whose films have displayed such a marked tendency towards the overheated (Black Swan, Mother!) or po-faced (The Fountain, The Whale, Noah), it’s refreshing to find him offsetting kinetic violence with an impudent tone – the Yojimbo formula, and just one of the many facets of its director’s undimmed legacy.
Read on: Mike Davis, ‘The Flames of New York’, NLR 12.
