“We’re jazz musicians,” the director Spike Lee recently said of his working dynamic with Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest, a new crime thriller that marks the fifth collaboration between the two Oscar winners. “We respect Julie Andrews singing My Favorite Things, but when John Coltrane did it, you know, or when Miles [Davis] did his standard of My Funny Valentine, it’s a different thing.”
The metaphor is no throwaway. Since Lee’s breakout on to the cultural scene in the 1980s, the Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-made auteur has been at pains to style himself as an outgrowth of old school storytelling traditions even as critics tarred him as a new-school disrupter. From She’s Gotta Have It to Chi-Raq, Lee has made the extra effort to venerate the athletes, artists and thinkers who have shaped his distinctly analog worldview. Highest 2 Lowest was meant to be a “reinterpretation and not a remake”, he said of the 1963 Japanese crime noir directed by Akira Kurosawa – officially acknowledged in the new film’s end credits as “the master”. But ultimately Lee uses his latest joint as a Trojan horse to launch fresh attacks against a stubborn personal bugbear: the changing times.
In Kurosawa’s film, Kingo Gongo (the pre-eminent Toshirō Mifune) is a shoe company executive forced to choose between certain financial ruin and saving his chauffeur’s son when a kidnapper mixes up their two boys. The same premise holds true for Washington’s David King – the golden-eared recording mogul behind Stackin’ Hits, itself a composite of Stax and other Black-owned labels of lore. As in the original, Highest 2 Lowest introduces King as he’s staking his sizable fortune to execute a leveraged buyout. And like Gongo, he feels compelled to do so to maintain a vintage quality standard.
But where Gongo hopes to stem a tide of cheaply made, cardboard-grade shoes, King aims to protect his towering record catalog against unrelenting threats from AI and advertising. Never mind that this particular message is being brought to you by a man who has hawked everything from shoes to banking to water. In Highest 2 Lowest, characters make jokey references to insurance commercial mascots; one of them, Allstate’s Mayhem (Dean Winters) even crosses over into this production.
From his midtown high rise corner office perch, surrounded by pictures of Aretha Franklin, LL Cool J and other music icons, King yearns for a past when real music was swingin’ and makes a goal of restoring those times for the sake of a greater cultural good. It’s a cognitive dissonance that Lee appeared to wrestle with in the real-life marketing for the film. Teasers for Highest 2 Lowest prominently tout the rapper Ice Spice, a one-hit wonder oft-derided as an industry plant. But her true screen time is limited to a brief meeting at Stackin’ Hits HQ that sees King smile politely at her character before rushing off to tend to more important business. In hindsight, the ruse is clear – Ice Spice was just the carrot to get young viewers through the turnstiles – and so is the contempt dripping from the auteur and his avatar.
King doesn’t just work backwards. He lives in a literal past. His waterfront penthouse in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighborhood is a monument to Black history to rival the Smithsonian’s African American museum. Inside the King’s split-level domicile, Jean Michel Basquiat’s Now’s the Time competes for pride of place with Kehinde Wiley’s Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia – a supreme homage of old from new commissioned for Lee himself, one of several movie props derived from the director’s personal collection. Lee’s tight focus on the decor and intentional cutaways – from the Toni Morrison portrait on one wall to Shepard Fairey’s Kamala poster on another – highlights the connection between these significant works.
Lee is just as heavy-handed about the musical scoring in Highest 2 Lowest, which overpowers the story at times. When the film opened with grand shots of the New York skyline set to a straight performance of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, I figured Lee would cut it off after 30 seconds or 45 seconds – especially after the low-key shade he threw at Julie Andrews. But, no, he lets the Oklahoma! standard run through to its three-plus minute conclusion.
This, I suspect, was done to introduce younger filmgoers to Norm Lewis (who made history in 2006 as the first Black person to play Javert in a professional English-language production of Les Misérables on Broadway) and urge them to revel in a level of vocal genius that once seemed so routinely achievable without computer assistance. The first major action sequence in Highest 2 Lowest, set against a Puerto Rican festival in the Bronx, is underscored by an indulgent live performance from the Latin jazz pioneer Eddie Palmieri. With every classic song choice and artist photograph, which aren’t limited to the black-and-white glossies tacked around King’s corner office, Lee prevails upon viewers the superiority of his particular analog tastes.
Where High and Low largely concerns itself with the question of class, Highest 2 Lowest wonders if there are any truly original cultural contributions after 2004 – apparently, the last year Stackin’ Hits was genuinely relevant. In his film, Kurosawa also interrogates contemporary media praxis before dismissing the press as a group-thinking, sensationalist herd. But Lee takes the critique even further through King, who doesn’t just rage at his son’s screen addiction but names the pushers: TMZ and its Black celebrity gossip knockoff, MediaTakeOut.
The ragebait sets King up for a showdown with the kidnapper, a drill rap street sensation named Yung Felon played by A$AP Rocky. As Felon explains, he was pushed into the random scheme after King ignored his attempts to reach out and share his music. The conceit not only ignores the psychedelic era in which hip-hop comfortably finds itself now, but does even more to amplify the music’s association with what behavior conservatives might charitably characterize as unrefined, when they’re not outright calling it ghetto. (They minced even fewer words about jazz back in the day …) When King diagnoses Yung Felon as soulless and shrugs off his burgeoning following, a sign that would seem to suggest there’s some intrinsic value and authenticity in his art, Young Felon shoots back with live rounds and fulfills his no-good thug stereotype. It’s quite the turnabout from Lee’s seminal 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which lionized hip-hop as a voice of protest and community.
Lee presses this point home in an interpolated music video for Trunks, an A$AP track that’s lent to the Yung Felon character. Lee situates Washington’s King amid a phalanx of twerking stripper bottoms. Given the nearly two hours’ worth of carefully curated cultural celebration that came before, the moment initially struck me as crass. (Washington turns his back to camera for most of the scene, as reveling in it would be seen as beneath an actor of his caliber.) But crass is precisely the takeaway Lee was going for.
Disappointingly, Highest 2 Lowest forgoes the opportunity to provide a modern spin on Kurosawa’s class allegory. Instead, it picks up a harangue Lee launched in the 2000 film Bamboozled, a strident broadside against what he saw as the corruption of modern Black cultural expression. Ironically, Lee saved this forceful rejection of new school values for his first production made in collaboration with A24 and Apple. The film’s rising action is basically a long and tortured product placement sequence for AirPods, Maps and two middling updates to A$AP’s Music catalog. Tellingly, the tech is exempted from the lowbrow status assigned to the other newfangled ideas struggling for light in the shadow of Lee’s unimpeachable taste. That Highest 2 Lowest failed to net a widespread theatrical release in the commercial exchange ultimately goes to show what today’s culture gatekeepers think about him, not Denzel – arguably an even more compelling box office draw with retirement looming.
For Highest 2 Lowest to wind down with King charting a new path with a classic female lounge act (Aiyana-Lee) just puts the fine point on Lee’s weak indictment of These Times. You just wonder how much longer he can carry on whingeing nostalgic like this, Grandpa Simpson-style, before turning into a relic himself.
