In depicting grave subjects with comic artifice, Lee makes “Chi-Raq” this year’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”-a work of such freedom and fury that it runs the risk of moralizing misinterpretation. Aristophanes’ play is gleefully erotic-or riotously obscene-and so is “Chi-Raq” “Lysistrata” is hectic and veers toward the ridiculous, and so does “Chi-Raq.” Lee’s audacity is as unbridled as his vision. “Chi-Raq” is a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” from 411 B.C., about a group of women who withhold sex from men in order to get them to end the ruinous Peloponnesian War. And it’s radically angry about grievous and hypocritical, callous and cruel and racist departures from American promise, as well as radically mournful of the lives lost to gun violence and to gang violence. It’s radically patriotic in its demand for American practice to live up to American principles, American realities to live up to American dreams, and American residents to take up the challenge of distinctively American virtues. Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” set in a few neighborhoods in Chicago, is an American movie and a movie about America. It’s a monstrous commonplace that guns are as American as apple pie, but that’s why a movie about guns, the agony of gun violence, and the crying need to control and renounce guns has to be a big, philosophical, wide-ranging film-a movie that feels as raucous and mighty and capacious and vigorous and ornery and moral and immoral and wild as the country itself. Photograph by Parrish Lewis via Amazon Studios/Roadside Attractions
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