Producers: Todd Black and Jason Michael Berman Director: Spike Lee Screenplay: Alan Fox Cast: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, A$AP Rocky, Aubrey Joseph, Dean Winters, LaChanze, John Douglas Thompson, Michael Potts, Isis “Ice Spice” Gaston, Elijah Wright, Frederick Weller, Wendell Pierce, Nick Turturro, Rick Fox, Rod Strickland, Eddie Palmieri and Aiyana-Lee Distributor: A24/Apple+
Grade: B
A closing caption makes clear that “Highest 2 Lowest” is a homage to Akira Kurosawa, but just as that great director radically altered its source, Ed McBain’s (i.e., Evan Hunter’s) 1959 novel “King’s Ransom,” to fit its new Japanese setting in “High and Low” (1963), Spike Lee reimagines Kurosawa’s film not just by modernizing and refashioning the plot to make it his own, but by returning it to its New York City roots. (McBain’s 87th Precinct was located in the fictional Isola, of course, but everyone knew it was really NYC.)
The film’s opening credits are set against swooning, wide-screen shots of the Big Apple’s skyline, set to the soaring strains of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma.” Matthew Libatique’s luxuriating widescreen lens finally settles on a multi-level, terraced skyscraper set high atop a hill in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighborhood, finally focusing on a patio where David King (Denzel Washington), a music mogul, is exuberantly explaining his plans into a telephone. He’s secretly arranging funding to buy back Stackin’ Hits, the record label he founded back in the day, which had been sold some years before to a conglomerate he believes is now planning to betray its cultural roots by selling off its catalogue and destroying its identity. The scheme requires putting everything he owns—reflected in the sumptuousness of his apartment and office as fashioned by production designer Mark Friedberg and the elegant costumes of Francine Jamison-Tanchuck—on the line with creditors, but he’s imbued with renewed energy at the idea, even if his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) is taken aback at the thought of putting their lifestyle at risk for his dream of preserving his legacy—and adding to it.
One person David trusts implicitly is Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), the friend he grew up with in a rough neighborhood and hired as his driver after Paul’s stint “upstate.” Their bond is further cemented in the next generation: Trey King (Aubrey Joseph) is the best buddy of Kyle Christopher (Elijah Wright), who’s also King’s godson, and the two are attending a basketball clinic together. When Trey’s sidelined with an ankle twist, the two boys slip out of the training unobserved except by a kidnapper. David soon receives a call saying that Trey is being held for ransom, and immediately decides to use the money he’s collected to buy back his label for the ransom, even though his loan agreements preclude his using the money for any undesignated purpose. Then Trey shows up unharmed; the kidnapper has instead snatched Kyle, whom he’d mistaken for Trey because he was wearing Trey’s distinctive headband. By then a bevy of cops have arrived, led by Detectives Bridges (John Douglas Thompson), Bell (LaChanze) and Higgins (Dean Winters), to take charge. And David is confronted with a moral question: will he be willing to put his fortune, and perhaps his freedom, on the line to rescue his friend’s son rather than his own?
Thus far Alan Fox’s script has hewn fairly closely to the plot established by McBain and Kurosawa, but from this point Lee’s film diverges in important respects. The earlier works become police procedurals in which the protagonist’s ethical quandary, while hardly forgotten, becomes secondary to the elaborate steps the authorities devise to try to identify and capture the kidnapper. Fox and Lee don’t ignore their predecessors—indeed, the spectacular sequence they mount to depict how the effort to subvert the successful transfer of the cash, involving a subway ride crammed with Yankee fans led by a manic Nick Turturro, a street celebration where Eddie Palmieri is performing with his band, and a constellation of motorcycles passing the loot from one rider to another, is a far more complex version of the commuter train episode in Kurosawa’s film. (And not just more complex, but more confused topographically, though viscerally exciting as shot by Libatique and edited by Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson, with further punch added by Howard Drossin’s score, which here abandons the lush, overripe tone it exudes elsewhere to opt for energy over voluptuousness.)
But in tracking down the kidnapper, it’s King and Paul who do the heavy lifting, with the police relegated to the background after the failure of their subway strategy. And it’s King’s fabled musical ear and Paul’s street contacts, not dogged police work, that lead to the identification of the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky). Curiously, when it comes to the impact of the incident on King’s career, endangered by betrayals and legal quibbles, Lee opts for something less cynical than Kurosawa’s denouement though no less a triumph of ideals, encapsulated in a coda spotlighting Ayana-Lee as a singer whose audition proves that King’s ear remains undiminished.
But the motive behind the crime remains much the same, and Kurosawa’s confrontation-through-a-glass-barrier confrontation between perpetrator and victim is mirrored by Lee not once but twice, first with a clever rap twist and then with a critique of the inexplicable crudity of modern media frenzy. (He fails, however, to come up with a counterpart to the Japanese director’s hallucinatory sequence set in the haze of a drug demi-monde, though King’s descent into the kidnapper’s subterranean world is presumably meant to fulfill that role.) Lee also lightens things occasionally with in-jokes and some strategically-placed cameos by the likes of Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos.
Throughout the focus is on Washington, who responds with a protean performance that powerfully captures King’s radical emotional swerves. Wright’s turn as a widower infused with religious fervor who tries to navigate a way between loyalty to his friend and devotion to his son is less showy but nicely detailed, and A$AP Rocky contributes an unnervingly accurate portrait of a young man driven by anger and desperation. Among the others Winters is most notable as a cop whose prejudices aren’t well hidden and whose volatility over failure reflect what is probably Lee’s attitude toward the force as a whole.
Despite the switch to superlatives in the title, Lee’s film doesn’t eclipse its more modest model, but it’s a smooth, engrossing—and personal—rethinking of McBain’s rock-solid premise.