Courtesy of Netflix
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Four African American veterans (joined by one of their sons) assemble in a Ho Chi Minh City hotel. The vets aren’t on holiday but are searching for the cache of gold bars they buried in the jungle 50 years earlier.
The search for buried treasure is a tall tale allowing director Spike Lee to construct a platform for his characters to talk about the black experience from different perspectives. Da 5 Bloods is essentially a history lesson opening with a montage of footage and stills from the ‘60s and ‘70s—shots of war and protests, space flight, the shootings at Kent State and (the less publicized shooting of black students at) Jackson State, snippets of speeches by Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. During the main sequence of the narrative, Lee periodically cuts away to captioned visuals of African American history—the service rendered by blacks to a country that didn’t accept them, from the Boston Massacre’s Crispus Attucks through forgotten heroes of the Vietnam War.
The screenplay is didactic but serves the director’s mission. As several French characters periodically remind the protagonists, Americans are ignorant of the world and their own history.
The four veterans were all deeply affected by their wartime experience. One of them, Paul (Delroy Lindo) is crazy. He speaks at night to the ghost of their inspirational squad leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman)—and he voted for Trump!
Loosely jointed and leisurely, Da 5 Bloods explores a familiar theme in Lee’s oeuvre—the tension between advocating progress through violence or through peaceful means. Da 5 Bloods lands on Netflix at a pregnant moment in American history where ideas for change aren’t just on the table but are shouted out in the streets.
