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I’d been curious about Highest 2 Lowest since it premiered at Cannes earlier this summer. For the past year or so, I’ve been working my way through Akira Kurosawa’s catalogue, and his High and Low is one of my favourites so far. Visually stunning, emotionally compelling, and at some points—the points that take place on a train—totally thrilling. A Kurosawa adaptation is mighty ambitious, but it’s not the first time Spike Lee has tackled an established classic. And as far as I’m concerned, if there’s anybody who can go toe-to-toe with Toshirō Mifune in terms of sheer star power and magnetism, it’s Denzel Washington.
So, yes—curious, intrigued…and a bit dubious. Simply put, Spike Lee’s vibe is not really for me. He seems fundamentally incurious about experiences that aren’t his own, and too comfortable trafficking in genuinely harmful stereotypes, and both of those qualities really limit him as an artist. Which is a real shame to me, because when he’s locked in, he creates some transcendent goddamn art.
[Let me quickly get this out of the way—Ice Spice and Princess Nokia are both one-scene wonders here. Their participation in this movie has been wildly overstated, both as a reason to attend1 and as a reason to be skeptical2.]
The story’s premise is killer: music industry mogul David “King David” King (Denzel, natch) has just decided that he doesn’t want to sell his record label and spend more time with his family, but instead wants to recommit himself to the music business. That same day, his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) gets kidnapped from Rick Fox’s3 basketball camp and held for a multi-million ransom. David, whose entire family is dripping with diamonds and whose multi-story penthouse is stuffed with Basquiats and Kehinde Wileys, frets about pulling the money together, only to balk when he learns that it wasn’t his son who got kidnapped. It was his son’s best friend, and the only son of his loyal driver and confidant, Paul (Jeffrey Wright). The kidnapper doesn’t care about the mix-up, but David does.
That premise is brimming with tension and conflict. King David’s wealth and power, which have insulated him from most of life’s frictions, have suddenly made him a target. The assurances Paul makes that Trey is just like a son to him don’t flow as readily in the opposite direction when Trey turns up safe, and it falls to David to assure Paul. (In a marvelous entry in the “Denzel Washington Always Plays a Bully” canon, David mocks his driver for begging him to pay the ransom as a loan. “You’ve never had no 17.5 million. You can’t even count to 17.5.”) The NYPD get involved, and interact with the wealthy Kings much more gingerly than they do with the previously incarcerated Paul. And the corporate intrigue of David reversing a sale that’s been years in the planning…I mean, I can’t tell y’all how much I love a plot about cobbling together 51% of the shares.
Unfortunately, Lee fumbles so very much of this fried gold premise. The dialogue is offensively clunky, with lines like “my father, the man with the greatest ears in the business—and the coldest heart” triggering actual groans from me. The acting is all over the place, with Ilfenesh Hadera gold medalling in “go girl, give us nothing” as David’s wife Pam on one end, and Dean “Mayhem” Winters shoveling as much scenery into his open maw as humanly possible on the other. (Wendell Pierce lands perfectly in the middle, as he always does, for his ONE scene.)
Most jarring of all is Howard Drossin’s score—jarring especially because this is a movie about a music industry titan, so one would hope that the music would be well developed. Alas, this score is cartoonishly bombastic, drowning out what could have been emotionally resonant moments. God knows I don’t go to a Spike Lee joint for subtlety, and I think subtlety often gets mischaracterized as a virtue when it’s just a trait. But some things could use a light touch, you know? And a movie about a man with “the best ears in the business”—as even Don Lemon pops in to tell us—should know when music of all things needs that light touch.
Lee also seems characteristically, and bafflingly, incurious about what should be significant emotional narrative beats. The most galling to me is the inciting event—when the kidnapper calls King to tell him that (1) he has King’s son, and (2) he wants $17.5 million in Swiss francs. Lee stages that phone call with the camera inside the family penthouse, and Denzel on the balcony, with a glass door between him and the camera. We don’t hear the kidnapper’s voice, nor do we see Denzel register the news. We instead get to watch Denzel tell his wife what he just heard. And this decision provoked some curiosity in me, honestly.
Like, WHY choose to have this first phone call happen silently, and far away enough as to be basically off-screen? Why delay establishing the rapport between King and the kidnapper, which becomes the emotional hook of the movie? And you have world champion face actor Denzel Washington in your movie—WHY use him to tell his wife about the call? Why not show him? Ain’t this a movie?? We have time to watch Pam instruct the police on how to move centerpieces off the dining table, but not watch David take the news that his son is in danger?
But when Lee locks in? Baybee. This movie gets to singing. As soon as David gets involved in the actual ransom handoff, and the movie shifts from the penthouse to the city streets, everything comes alive. The action jumps between a tense subway ride, a tenser car chase, and the Puerto Rican Day Parade; and for those scenes, I could hardly breathe I was so in love with New York City. (And with action scenes set on trains.)
And when A$AP Rocky appears with all of his dark charisma, Lee locks in again, and finally shows the love of music that the movie has been telling us about for over an hour. Watching Denzel and A$AP battle is an electrifying, tantalizing glimpse of what should have powered the whole movie.
But for me, the three transcendent highs that Spike Lee gives us come too late and do too little when stacked against the lows. Outside of any scene involving a train and/or A$AP, it barely plays like a story so much as a collection of signifiers—of Black excellence, of racist policing, of how the music business is too much about the business and not enough about the music. I really do wish this long-awaited Spike and Denzel reunion had lived up to my hopes for it. I guess I’ll always have Akira and Toshirō.
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