No filmmaker loves the dirty old town that is New York more than Spike Lee. Some of us who live there will return from a day out and about—a day whose adventures might include traversing streets strewn with trash, or catching news of some terrible shooting or stabbing (though that happens less often than you’d imagine)—and still think, This, and nowhere else, is home. Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, playing out of competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, is a new entry on the scroll of great New York films. It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental. With Akira Kurosawa as his guiding star—the film is a reimagining of the Japanese master’s 1963 High and Low, a police procedural with a deep moral underpinning—Lee has made a film that feels modest and grand at once, the kind of movie you can see on a Saturday night just for kicks and still be thinking about the next day.
Denzel Washington plays David King, a record-company mogul who was riding high in the early years of the 21st century but whose company is now barely breaking even. That company, Stackin’ Hits Records, is up for sale, but King doesn’t want to give it up. Instead, he’s scrambling to buy back his controlling stake. His wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), knowing the state of the couple’s finances, isn’t so sure, but she supports her husband. Their plans shift drastically when King receives a phone call informing him that the couple’s teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped; his best friend Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s chauffeur and closest friend, Paul (Jeffrey Wright, father of Elijah in real life), has gone missing as well. Within minutes, a phalanx of cops shows up at the couple’s swanky apartment; they advise King on how to proceed. Tension hangs in the air like the luxe mod chandelier suspended from the penthouse’s impossibly high ceilings. And then Pam and David learn that Trey has been found. The kidnappers grabbed the wrong kid; they’ve got Kyle instead.
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Highest 2 Lowest has been adapted rather faithfully from Kurosawa’s version, which was based on a novel by Evan Hunter. (The crisp screenplay is by Alan Fox.) That means the initial moral quandary—should King feel obligated to pay a $17.5 million ransom, money he doesn’t really have, to save a kid who’s not his own?—is resolved rather quickly. But King’s hesitation to save his best friend’s child, even in the face of Paul’s anguish, tells us something about him. As a guy who’s built a fortune signing artists who’ve got the goods, King has the best ears in the business, as one character after another reminds us. But even he balks, for more than a few hours, at the idea of saving his friend’s kid. He’s the kind of guy who’ll do the right thing—eventually. That’s not a damnation of him; it’s just a reminder that it’s human nature to put oneself first. We all stumble, at one time or another, on the path to generosity, and Washington is terrific at capturing the texture of all those little doubts that hold us back; he can turn a modest squint into a signal of intense moral reckoning. And he has more than one terrific scene with one of his costars, the roguishly charismatic A$AP Rocky: they play off one another with the crackling competitiveness, and camaraderie, of ace jazz musicians trading eights.
The rest of Highest 2 Lowest fulfills every expectation you might want from a modern Spike Lee movie. Though Lee gave us one of the greatest New York movies of all time—and one of the greatest movies of all time, period—in 2001, with 25th Hour, he hasn’t made a movie set in New York since 2012’s Red Hook Summer. This one, shot by Matthew Libatique, is gleamingly beautiful right from the opening sequence, in which the city unfolds, in all its iridescent pigeon-feather splendor, as “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” soars on the soundtrack. As tunes go, this one, with its half-homespun, half-surreal reference to corn growing as high as an elephant’s eye, is the opposite of urbane. But the incongruity is the point: as an expression of spontaneous daybreak joy, it’s unparalleled. Similarly, Howard Drossin’s magnificent score—sometimes majestic, sometimes achingly melancholy—follows the movie’s shifting moods perfectly. Every choice Lee has made pays off handsomely, and the movie’s action centerpiece—involving a subway chase, a Puerto Rican Day celebration featuring salsa great Eddie Palmieri, and a motorcycle relay of exquisite precision—might be the most beautifully edited sequence you’ll see all year. (Lee’s editors here are Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson.)
We knew from the beginning that Lee was a rulebreaker and a groundbreaker. But he’s also a traditionalist, an inventive and energetic one. He honors those who came before him; he’s studied them, taking their lessons to heart. That’s how you get a lustrous entertainment, one with a soul, like Highest 2 Lowest. Sometimes great craftsmanship, especially in a mainstream film, just makes you want to shout. Doesn’t anyone else get tired of the workaday TV and movies getting pushed before our eyeballs week after week, fodder made with just a base level of competence, if that? Lee has made some pretty imperfect movies during his long career—but so have most of the greats. He may go through periods where he makes films that are just OK, but then he raises the bar. And then he raises it again. As others’ standards sink, his climb higher—higher, even, than an elephant’s eye. The top of the Empire State Building is next.
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