A Tree Strives in Brooklyn

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Spike Lee is better at setting agendas than he is at making movies. The laudable intention behind Crooklyn is, he says, to move beyond "the hip-hop, drug, gangsta-rap, urban-inner-city movies," which he claims constitute "a rut" into which black filmmakers have fallen. He has a point, though some of his competitors' work (for example, The Inkwell) has shown more range than he cares to admit. What he does not have here is a movie that attractively accomplishes his goal.

The Carmichaels are a middle-class black family living in Brooklyn in the early '70s. The father, Woody (Delroy Lindo), is a jazz musician who doesn't get much work because he only wants to play music he respects. He is easygoing and indulgent of his children, four boys and a girl, Troy (played by the adorable and spirited Zelda Harris in her first major role). The mother, Carolyn (Alfre Woodard), is hardworking and hard-nosed. She loves the kids but believes in discipline and denial.

This story may be in part autobiographical (Lee wrote it with his sister Joie Susannah and his brother Cinque), but the characters and their situation also owe something to 1945's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in which an immigrant family offered similar characters, though not so large a family, facing the same basic problems: clinging to their respectability and trying to make certain the kids grow up smart, honest and able to claim a surer place for themselves in the world.

These are good issues to make a movie about; most American families have faced them in one form or another. They transcend race and locale, and are rendered more poignant when you remember that the Carmichael kids are going to have to face prejudice too.

But our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking. The first half of the film is a jumble of pointless anecdotes that fail to pull into a compelling narrative scheme or establish characters of any dimension. The boys squabble endlessly, humorlessly, inconsequentially, and Lindo and Woodard, both fine actors, are given only one note apiece to sound, respectively patience and impatience. In a middle passage, little Troy is sent to visit relatives in the South for no particular reason, except possibly to register Lee's disdain of smug bourgeois ways, and to contrast this with the fractiousness of her siblings and the liveliness of city street life. In the end, as if to make up for missed dramatic opportunities, Carolyn Carmichael is suddenly stricken with an undefined terminal illness. But fear, grief, loss -- the powerful emotions bound to be loosed by this sudden realization of childhood's most terrifying fantasy -- are avoided by Lee. Carolyn dies quietly offscreen. Her children, and the movie, are denied emotional release.

It is curious how often Lee's movies evade confrontation with the emotions or the controversial ideas they raise. Lee is a great self-promoter. After all his press releases and all his interviews, we are given films that are sketchy, unfelt and distancing -- incidents in Lee's career, the only drama that really interests him.