“Highest 2 Lowest” Marks a Conservative Pivot for Spike Lee

It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s Spike Lee’s turn, and in his new drama, “Highest 2 Lowest,” he shifts in a surprising way. The film is a remake of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama “High and Low,” among the greatest police procedurals. Lee turns the story into what is one of his most personal films, both emotionally and intellectually. Often, directors’ self-transformations involve changes in modes of production: Scorsese broke away from the studios and found independent financing; Coppola self-financed. Lee, who has had his own production company throughout his career, makes “Highest 2 Lowest”a film about his particular modes of production, one that focusses on the underlying notion of owning the means of production.

“Highest 2 Lowest” is a story of culture—of how it’s created and disseminated, flowing (in both directions) between the highest echelons of society and the lowest. The movie starts on high, with rapturous views of the Manhattan skyline and David King (Denzel Washington), one of the city’s highfliers, pacing on the balcony of his penthouse on the Brooklyn waterfront. A music executive, he’s discussing his plan to regain control of Stackin’ Hits, the label he founded. Five years ago, he sold a controlling interest, which is about to pass into the hands of a holding company that he fears will strip the label for parts, dispersing the archive of Black music that he enshrined there. David’s investment in the company is more than financial: renowned for having “the best ears in the business” (if you haven’t heard, he’ll tell you), he has been behind fifty Grammy winners and his music once dominated the charts. These days, the label barely breaks even, but he is looking to preserve his legacy and perhaps to recapture his glory days.

David and his wife, Pamela (Ilfenesh Hadera), are pillars of New York’s Black establishment, regular six-figure contributors to the Studio Museum in Harlem, but his planned buyout involves putting up the family’s entire fortune. Sitting in his Rolls-Royce en route to his office, in midtown, he turns to his chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), for counsel. The men are lifelong friends, having grown up together in a rough Bronx housing project. Paul, who freely refers to his time “upstate”—that is, in prison—is grateful to David for putting him back on solid footing, and the pair’s bond is deepened by their having sons around the same age. David’s son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), and Paul’s son, Kyle (Elijah Wright, the actor’s son), are best friends and are attending a summer basketball clinic together at Long Island University. (The coaches are L.I.U.’s actual coach, Rod Strickland, and the former N.B.A. player Rick Fox, both playing themselves.)

With the arrogance of privilege, the teens slip out onto the streets, and Kyle is kidnapped. As in Kurosawa’s film, the friends have swapped clothes, leading the kidnapper to snatch the chauffeur’s son rather than the mogul’s. When the kidnapper, thinking he’s holding Trey, first calls in, David prepares to cover the ransom with the money earmarked for buying back his label. When Trey shows up at home and it becomes clear that it’s Kyle who is missing, David initially refuses to pay, but friendship and worry about bad publicity impel him to go ahead.

David is exceptionally motivated to get his money back: not only are his wealth and his business on the line, but making personal use of funds contractually committed to the buyout may also expose him to criminal charges. This is where “Highest 2 Lowest” diverges most from Kurosawa’s film. In “High and Low,” once the ransom is paid and the boy is returned, catching the kidnapper is a police matter, an intricate mass mobilization; in Lee’s version, David himself dominates the hunt, and, crucially, the culprit turns out to be someone in his professional field. Filming largely from David’s perspective, and augmenting the action with cultural politics, Lee seems fully in sympathy with the protagonist’s viewpoint.

Lee, working with a script by Alan Fox, spins out the multiple threads of action with startling swiftness and characteristically rapid-fire, confrontational dialogue. The cinematography, by Matthew Libatique, has a sense of swing, and “Highest 2 Lowest” often plays like a sassy duet for camera and star. Washington’s invigorating performance goes far beyond charisma and technique to enrich the role with an imaginative repertory of seemingly spontaneous gestures: a chilling series of gun-pointing fingers when in doubt; the removal of a diamond earring at a point of financial need. Washington delivers the dialogue with a thrilling range from purrs to roars, all imbued with an authoritative swagger. In the few moments when his swagger falters, he nearly rends the screen with anguish.

The movie’s sense of swing isn’t merely ornamental, and it certainly isn’t neutral; the tonality of Lee’s visual and dramatic art, from writing and acting to framing and editing, has always been inseparable from his world view. With “Highest 2 Lowest,” starting from the opening credit sequence’s soaring glide through New York’s gleaming side, Lee conveys a city of boundless ambition in vital and vigorous motion—but set in motion, now, from the top down. The story and the images converge in a vision of economic Realpolitik, with a sense of jobs created, careers fostered, ideas conveyed, and institutions founded and sustained, through the inspired cultural capitalism of producers with a critic’s discernment, an artist’s passion, and a financier’s savvy, drive, and daring.

Even the intense bromantic warmth of David and Paul’s bond reinforces a distinctive view of power: David, for all his boardroom-honed elegance, has the same street-tough background as Paul, who provides the cunning and the muscle to back up David’s cultural politics. (He also has the movie’s funniest line: describing his gun as “insurance,” Paul calls it “Jake, from State Farm.”) The police—foremost three detectives, played by John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, and Dean Winters—lend David additional muscle. Showing up at the King penthouse with startling rapidity, they set up shop there to monitor the situation and guide the family through the ransom negotiations. They are as fiercely protective of David as they are relentlessly hostile to Paul, whom they view as merely a criminal. “Highest 2 Lowest” is hardly copaganda, but it nonetheless offers a clear-eyed vision of the legal infrastructure, ranging from courts and prisons to street-level law enforcement, that sustains David’s business empire and the musical agenda that it advances.

For all David’s dependence on his nearest and dearest, and on social institutions at large, “Highest 2 Lowest” is the story of a self-made man who ends up taking the law into his own hands—and who does so aided by the talent that is at the core of his success, his ear for music. David is forced, by the kidnapper, to deliver the money himself, in an intricate, tensely dramatic sequence that (as in Kurosawa’s film) is centered on a moving train—here, the 4 train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, from which David must throw the loot. Police officers seeking to thwart the getaway are impeded by the festivities of the Puerto Rican Day parade, which features a sublime performance by the salsa great Eddie Palmieri (who died earlier this month, at the age of eighty-eight). In lieu of Kurosawa’s realistic vision of law enforcement, Lee offers a hallucination in realistic guise: David, seconded by Paul, descends to the kidnapper’s subterranean lair, near the friends’ childhood home.

It’s pointless to discuss “Highest 2 Lowest” without risking a spoiler and mentioning that the perpetrator is a rapper (played by the real-life musician A$AP Rocky, a.k.a. Rakim Mayers). The rapper, who’d hoped in vain that David would sign him and launch him, is the crucial hinge not only in the movie’s plot but in Lee’s philosophical approach to it. Early on, Pamela questions why David even wants to reacquire Stackin’ Hits, suggesting that his passion for the music he once released is gone; the kidnapper turns out to embody exactly the kind of music for which David is no longer passionate. And it is David’s view of culture, of authenticity and legitimacy, that wins out: his version of a happy ending involves Black music based in jazz and gospel, with no trace of hip-hop, and a vision of business as practically a mom-and-pop store (complete with nepo baby).

Lee’s aesthetic of production, and of the power that’s an essential and inescapable part of art, is fundamentally conservative—and no less stimulating for being so. Many great filmmakers, such as Whit Stillman, Éric Rohmer, and Clint Eastwood, have graced the cinema with original aesthetics for conservative viewpoints, but it’s an unexpected plot twist to see Lee join them. With “Highest 2 Lowest,” it’s as if Lee, facing Manhattan from high in Dumbo, with his back to the rest of Brooklyn, were crossing the East River Rubicon. Oddly, the move comes not as a renunciation but as a new adventure. The movie’s subject may be production, but the director is striking boldly out into a strange new artistic world. ♦