Why Spike Lee's 'Malcolm X' remains a masterpiece

Delroy Lindo and Denzel Washington in Malcolm X

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Spike Lee's epic 1992 biopic Malcolm X (starring a riveting Denzel Washington) with three people who've never seen it before.

It's one of my favorite films, so I was already very much in the tank for it but seeing it through three new viewers eyes was certainly revealing.

For a film now over 20 years old it holds up remarkably well. Despite having a small budget, Lee works wonders with costume, setting and music. And then there's Denzel Washington's performance. Although this film came relatively early in his Hollywood career, it's the work all his future performances will likely be measured against. It's a true tour de force.

At nearly 4 hours, it's fair to the say the movie is tab overlong. Some sequences could have been pruned a little. And yet, as a whole, it's a remarkable portrait of the evolution of an imperfect man.

Malcolm X

Seeing this radical movie now, it's impressive to me that Warner Brothers financed it and allowed it to be distributed to national audiences in its current form. It begins with incendiary footage from the Rodney King beating, it does not shy away from the more extreme rhetoric Malcolm briefly espoused (the complete separation of the races), and it does not feature a single good liberal white character to symbolically redeem the rest.

At the center of it all is Washington, who holds the screen for almost the entire running time of the film, giving us a myriad of emotions and shadings of a character.

Through subtle shifts in his appearance and vocal inflection he communicates so much gravitas and charisma. His failure to win the Best Actor Oscar (he lost to an overdue Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman) is one of the great Academy Awards injustices of all time.

The film is also, is some ways, one of Lee's most accessible films. He used Lawrence of Arabia as a blueprint and it shows, particularly when the film's canvas opens up to include Malcolm's late-life pilgrimage to Mecca.

Some radical critics have griped that Lee sought to make Malcolm safe for a middle class bourgeois audience, but then why would the director dedicate over a third of the film (maybe too much) to his youth as an unrepentant hoodlum.

The point is that everyone could never be pleased with a film about someone as mercurial as Malcolm X, but for an attempt to encapsulate such an influential life, this is clearly a noble effort.

Lee was attempting something which had never really been done. An epic all-American film about a largely black subject and protagonist. He takes an even bigger risk by telling the story non-linearly, which is normally a disaster for these types of movies, and pulls it off.

At this coming Academy Awards, Lee will receive an honorary award that he richly deserves. He's been around so long (and his work has fallen off so much) that it's sometimes easy to take him for granted. But like Sidney Poitier was once the only game in town in terms of A-list black actors, Lee more or less occupied the same role as a prominent black filmmaker for years.

If he hadn't made work that was both profound and profitable, the state of black film could have been stuck in the stone ages. And if he never made another great film after Malcolm X (and for the record, he did), his legacy as an icon would be secure.