Image via iwatchstuff.com
I don’t normally do spoilers.
But, as the closing credits rolled on Red Hook Summer, I sat in the theatre asking what seemed like an obvious question—one that felt like a harsh rebuke of the film’s story and how it was told.
When I reveal this question, it will spoil a plot twist that comes at the end of the film. So, if you plan to see Red Hook Summer, and you prefer to preserve the surprise of the story then you should stop reading this.
SERIOUSLY.
SPOILER.
TO.
FOLLOW.
Red Hook Summer is a Spike Lee joint, his latest. It’s about a teenager from Atlanta whose mother ships him to Brooklyn to spend a summer getting to know his grandfather, an evangelical preacher.
The mother who appears to live a comfortable middle class life in the suburbs of Atlanta does not appear to get on very well with her father, the preacher who struggles righteously to eke out a working class life in the projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. We don’t quite know why. But we do know 1) The preacher had not met his grandson until the opening sequence of the film when the mother drops the teenager at his doorstep, and 2) The mother keeps a cab’s meter running while she’s doing that. Like, the chick won’t even set foot in her father’s home despite the fact that she hasn’t seen him in perhaps a decade. Something is really wrong with that relationship.
It’s fair, at the very outset of the film, to wonder: Why would a mother send her son for an unchaperoned visit with his grandfather whom she clearly loathes for some reason unknown to the audience?
It’s also fair to presume the film will answer that question at some point—regardless of how important it actually is to the story. The film kinda suggests the woman’s husband, the boy’s father, is a military man who was killed on some foreign soil because of some war. That important nugget, however, gets dropped into the story so briefly and breezily, that it’s fair to believe a person could miss it or misinterpret it. So, we’re still left to wonder: Why would a mother send her son for an unchaperoned visit with his grandfather whom she clearly loathes for some reason unknown to the audience?
That’s an important question the film doesn’t do enough to resolve. It’s kinda hanging out there. It could shuffle to the background were a viewer to become engrossed in the struggles of the preacher, his church and the boy stuck in a land very foreign to him. It could. But eventually there is the twist.
Image via The Rap Insider
LAST CHANCE.
SPOILER.
HAPPENING.
NOW.
Here’s the plot twist: Many years prior to the movie’s present day, the preacher molested a prepubescent boy when he lead a congregation in Georgia. That church learned of his wretchedness, paid the boy’s family off and paid the preacher to go away. Far away to Brooklyn as it turned out. We learn this in the final act of Red Hook Summer after minimal, mumbly deflections from the preacher throughout the film.
Finally, here’s my question: Why would a mother send her son for an unchaperoned visit with a child molester?
We don’t know, via the film, that the woman knows her father is a pedophile. But we do know she loathes her father. Maybe, just maybe, she loathes her father because she knows her father once molested a boy about the same age as her son, the one she’s chosen to serve to the preacher for three months of who knows what.
Why, in the navy blue eff ewe see kay, would she do that?
It’s beyond illogical. It’s a story that rates as inconceivable.
I’m not one for lecturing. And I have no authority to address Spike Lee and James McBride—the film’s screenwriters—other than the $12 I spent to see their film. But to the makers of Red Hook Summer, I say:
You need more people. I don’t believe you tried to tell a story with such a major flaw in it.
A very major, very spoiled flaw.
