History is power. That’s why the removal and destruction of statues devoted to Confederate leaders, slave owners, Jim Crow politicians, and other architects of American hatred going back to Columbus are not a sidebar but a principled core of the nationwide protests that have arisen in response to the police killing of George Floyd and other black men and women—because those protests are challenging the entire history of racist police violence and the long-standing society-wide policies and prejudices that have been used to justify it. But history is also memory—a matter of whose voices are heard, whose personal experiences are recorded, which communities’ experiences are officially chosen to represent a neighborhood, a city, a state, the country.
Spike Lee’s new film, “Da 5 Bloods” (streaming on Netflix), pulls the traumas of black men’s experiences of the Vietnam War out of obscurity and puts them in the forefront of political consciousness. Far from merely offering a corrective or footnote to a chapter of American history, he transforms them into a new and improved cinematic mythology, one that exalts the unacknowledged heroism of black Americans and creates a place for them at the center of modern culture—and, in the process, redefines American heroism as such.
The film tells the the story of four Vietnam War veterans and lifelong friends, distanced but not estranged, who regroup in Ho Chi Minh City with a dual mission: to recover the body of their former commanding officer and to collect a stash of gold bars that they’d buried after the firefight in which he was killed. When the four veterans gather, the tone is that of a hangout movie, and the leisurely pace of the early scenes—centered principally on the men at a table in a bar behind the loud throng at a night club called Apocalypse Now—is outrun by the mercurial dialogue, the memories that arise, the traumas that come to the fore.
“Da 5 Bloods” runs two hours and thirty-four minutes, but it’s not a second too long. On the contrary, it feels compressed, bustling, and frenzied with its intellectual and dramatic energy. The action—and there’s plenty of it—is intense, furious, yet parsed with a magisterial assurance, in images that range from the sculpturally iconic to the screen-piercingly intimate. The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration. The script—written by Lee and Kevin Willmott, who reworked an original version by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo—offers the actors a dazzling emotional spectrum, from sublime profanity and rowdy ball-breaking to soul-baring confrontation and quasi-scriptural exaltation.
Otis (Clarke Peters), who’s running the expedition from behind the scenes, has an air of quiet authority. Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), the least defined of the group, is something of its skeptical conscience. Eddie (Norm Lewis) is a glad-handing businessman with bourgeois habits and styles (he’s also an image-maker, travelling with a 35mm. S.L.R. and a Super-8 camera). The big and gruff Paul (Delroy Lindo), one of the most distinctive characters in recent cinema, is a Trump supporter, complete with MAGA cap, who thinks that immigrants are taking jobs from black people. Paul’s political position is roundly mocked by his friends, but they soon learn that he is deeply damaged: suffering from P.T.S.D. and carrying the agony of his commanding officer Norman’s killing; isolated and angry over the death of his wife, in childbirth; and in the grips of self-scourging rage that allow him no reconciliation with the Vietnamese people.
The festive yet solemn warmth of the first dramatic sequence, of the men’s reunion at the hotel lobby and the bar, is built upon a brief history lesson, a montage of clips that connect black American activists and the struggle for civil rights to opposition to the Vietnam War and the denunciation of the American atrocities perpetrated there—and of the white-supremacist ideology that gave rise to them. That history then gets dramatized throughout the film in one of Lee’s boldest dramatic strokes: the men’s wartime experiences—and, in particular, the events that led to the death in combat of their leader, Norman—recur as flashbacks throughout. For these flashbacks, Lee shifts the borders of the widescreen action to the narrower, nearly square, traditional Hollywood (and TV) aspect ratio. He also films the four older actors as their younger selves in the wartime action with no de-aging technology or makeup: the scenes recur from the perspective of the older men who lived them, alongside Norman, perpetually frozen in youth.
Norman’s absence is matched by the presence, on the expedition, of another young man who shows up uninvited: David (Jonathan Majors), Paul’s estranged son, a schoolteacher (and a Morehouse graduate, like Lee) who hopes to finally reconcile with his father. Though Paul wants to send him home, the men—led by Otis, who is David’s godfather—agree to bring him along. Otis’s leadership extends to the particulars of the treasure hunt: Tiên (Lê Y Lan), a Vietnamese woman with whom Otis had a relationship while stationed in Saigon, and who is the mother of a daughter (Sandy Huong Pham) whom he had never met, connects the four veterans with a suave French grifter (Jean Reno), who will launder—for a hefty fee—whatever gold they find. (Tiên also secretly provides Otis with a handgun, which of course will play a major role in the action.)
It’s through the character of Norman, a.k.a. Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), seen in the flashbacks, that Lee delivers some of his crucial history lessons. Telling David about Norman, Otis details the backstory to Norman’s command: the disregard of white officers for black draftees, who were thrust callously into harm’s way, used as cannon fodder. Norman, Otis explains, was a supreme soldier who passed his skills and wiles along to the other four men, in the interest not of victory or patriotic duty but of their survival. Norman was himself a student of history who gave the men an ideological focus (“He was our Malcolm and our Martin,” Otis says) and put it into play on the battlefield: “War is about money, money is about war,” Norman told them, and likened their treatment by the military command to their treatment by the police back home.
Norman’s body was never found; the gold was hidden at his behest. It had been sent by the Army as payment for South Vietnamese fighters; the plane that carried it crashed; the outfit was tasked with finding it; and Norman’s idea was to hide it and come back for it, as compensation for the sacrifices of black soldiers in a racist war and payment long overdue for the history of oppression endured by black Americans—as reparations, he called it. The men’s mission to find Norman’s remains is also a mission to honor his intentions—which happen to coincide with their sense of self-interest. Yet, of course, what the four veterans and David discover is that money is indeed war—that, in pursuing and transporting millions of dollars’ worth of gold, they are sparking a new round of horrific violence, and, in effect, not merely returning to the scene of their war but reviving and reliving it.
In “Da 5 Bloods,” Lee revisits and revises his 2008 film, “The Miracle at St. Anna,” also a drama of four black American soldiers, whose doomed mission in Nazi-occupied Italy in 1944 returns to the fore when, in 1984, one of them, a postal clerk, kills a seemingly random customer. The wartime action of that film—flashbacks that take up most of the movie—also dramatizes the deadly indifference that black soldiers endured. (Several key elements are echoed in the new film: a relationship with a local woman, enemy propaganda aimed at black American soldiers, hidden wartime treasure, and a stealthily offered handgun.) The earlier film, however, gives equal weight to local politics in Italy and even in the Nazi ranks, and distills the war’s recurrence to a tale of personal revenge. The essence of “Da 5 Bloods”—a story set entirely within Lee’s own lifetime and memory—is the experience of the Vietnam War and the war’s endurance into the present day, in concealed private wounds and unredressed public and political ones.
For Paul, the war has endured with a relentless, tormenting insistence. He is both the ferocious center of the expedition and its loose cannon, a powerful personality whose strength has turned monstrous, whose explosive secrets and self-deceptions risk spreading destruction wherever he goes. Visited by Norman in nightmares, haunted by the dead man’s spectral presence, Paul suffers in closed-in silence, refusing treatment, refusing to speak of his grief and his anguish. As wondrously engaged as the entire cast is, it’s Lindo, as Paul, who rises to a transcendent spiritual intensity, and his heights of performance are inseparable from Lee’s boldly impassioned images and oratorical script. Lindo embodies Paul’s furious, florid, tragic passions with a Shakespearean grandeur that’s all the mightier for its lofty element of lusty Shakespearean humor. What Paul goes through, and what his friends and his son go through with him, has a terrifying dramatic power that it would be cruel to describe here.
In fact, the movie’s elements of suspense make almost any description of the narrative twists and turns a risk for spoilers. What emerges, above all, is the sense of knowledge transmitted, from one generation of black men to another, and the colossal price that is paid by the bearers of this legacy. The transformative, prophetic power of “Da 5 Bloods” is rooted in its overarching sense of a never-ending war—not the Vietnam War, specifically, but the daily war at home that’s waged against black Americans, who are forced to fight for survival, equality, and justice.
