Get on the Bus (1996) – DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Ossie Davis, Charles S. Dutton
screenplay by Reggie Rock Bythewood
directed by Spike Lee

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Didactism is a treacherous course for a movie to take. Drive down that road and you chance accusations of propagandizing, as though taking a political position were a violation of some Hollywood code of enforced irrelevance; try as you might to avoid such a situation, be it through aesthetic compensations or the urgency of the issues at hand, overt politicking in a motion picture is usually–and unfairly–a good way to draw unfriendly fire.

Given this bleak situation, the pressure is on the filmmaker to prove his or her case as well as he or she possibly can, so that the unbelievers might possibly be won over through the sheer force of the argument and the clear articulation of the questions being asked. An unjustly tight bind, to be sure, but considering the pervasiveness of a film culture that rewards the maintenance of a brutal status quo, the need for such films has never been greater, providing that the cinema-speaker on hand understands the situation that he or she hopes to reveal.

On this last qualification, Spike Lee has had varying degrees of success. For instance, he has depicted, like no other director, the fluid nature of racial discourse, and in so doing undermined the basic assumptions that govern them; films like Bamboozled and the great Do the Right Thing wade deep into the semiotic arena and respectively trace the origins of racist imagery and examine the day-to-day assumptions that direct interracial interactions. And while accusations of stridency have dogged his heels since the beginning, he has been unusually tolerant–to a point–of the characters who populate his films, always giving them shots at redemption even if their ideological blinkers prohibit them from taking the suggestion.

Unfortunately, his ambitious attempts to get on top of all of the issues at once have often stretched his musings to the breaking point, making tenuous connections such as Jungle Fever's pairing of racial/sexual stereotyping with crack addiction. That bizarre non sequitur did neither side of its argument any favours, and it showed up the limitations of an attempt at macro-critique of micro-complexity. This brings us to his Get on the Bus, and its failure. The film is probably Lee's most far-reaching address to the body politic; though it is unusual in his filmography in having been written by someone else (Reggie Rock Bythewood), it is familiar in its daring panoramic vision, attempting to bring together every possible walk of black male life into one bus en route to the Million Man March.

Get on the Bus tries desperately to integrate everyone into an egalitarian vision of what black life could possibly be, but it can't cover up the fact that many of its characters' positions are simply too antithetical to let go without taking sides. Time and again the movie raises serious bones of contention between light-skinned and dark-skinned, gay and straight, cop and gangbanger, young and old, and time and again it either offers pat, unsatisfying solutions or refuses to offer any position at all, leaving the audience no more enlightened than when it went in. It's one thing to let us make up our own minds, but to do that it has to have a position to agree or disagree with; Get on the Bus doesn't offer any clear point of view to chew on, leaving our loyalties unchallenged and our basic prejudices intact.

The film's first sin lies in giving us a Stanley Kramer-esque collection of types meant to represent segments of the black populace. The roll call goes as follows: a father-son antagonism made bitter by the father's early avoidance of his responsibilities; a gay couple on the last legs of their relationship, making for maximum tension with many of the other men; a macho actor all too eager to rank on his bus mates; a light-skinned man who turns out to be a cop; an Islamic man who turns out to be an ex-gangster. Throw in, for a bit of colour, a 19-year-old film student with the irksome habit of shoving his Hi-8 camera in everyone's face, and an elderly man with A Secret, and you have a ship ready to set sail.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the didactic method of doling out political significance to your characters–how else are you supposed to see the social forces in action?–but the roles here are so restrictive that they cancel out any chance of transit between points of view. When the actor, who is generally depicted as a jerk, keeps needling his light-skinned and gay compatriots, we are simultaneously asked to disapprove of his position and accept it as an unmovable stone. This contradictory approach keeps the film from mapping out a plan for change, leaving us with individually stated positions instead of a push for collective understanding.

Adding to this limitation are the conversational nature of the characters' interactions, an artificial situation that further limits how far the analysis can go. There's a sense that the film was doomed with the decision to set the story entirely on a bus trip, an artificial situation that confines the action to traded barbs and speechifying- which, while establishing the views of the characters, further renders them unchangeable. Get on the Bus is mainly talk, and while Lee has in the past shown how the motives behind that talk can be extrapolated into action, he is here entirely unwilling and unable to do anything else but listen to his straw men argue fruitlessly.

By repressing the outside world of actions and their consequences, Lee and Bythewood never have to stray far outside of the hypothetical, further ensuring that their characters never have to change. Thus the horribly contrived capper, which admonishes everyone to be as good men as they can after the March, has absolutely no weight: it knows all too well that these people will leave the bus and return to their lives, atomized, because the film's confines are too restrictive to have proven anything beyond the ability of people to talk past each other.

When the film does stray into the matter of what the characters have done, the results are either so evasive that they prove nothing or so unsatisfying that they reinforce the wishy-washy nature of the rest of the film. When the father finally confronts his angry son, the result of an unplanned pregnancy and the father's initial refusal to deal with the situation, it's supposed to finally show the father dealing with the terrible situation that he has created; but the son shows no guilt and anger at having been forced into this position, and so his acceptance of his father's apologies seems like wishful thinking on the part of the filmmakers. Worse is the war of words that erupts between the cop and the ex-gangster (and their surrounding travelling companions), each one accusing the other of destroying the black community. While the film acts as though both of them have a point, a real follow-through on this concept would be to accept both characters as wrong and try to move past their assumptions. But Get on the Bus is so conceptually faulty that it has to back off from this conclusion, lest its pose of tolerance stray into a moral position on what to do.

It is, perhaps, not necessary for a film to give a straight dogmatic line on what is to be done. Simply exposing us to other opinions is a good way to challenge our own; we see what other people are thinking, taking us out of our biases and showing us the world of difference that surrounds us. But this only works to a point. At some juncture, we have to stop thinking about the situation and come up with a plan for action, because if we get lost in thought we might wind up stalling on the issues that are most important. For the most part, Spike Lee has avoided this pitfall, which makes the existence of Get on the Bus all the more puzzling: it shows the man who ended two films with a call to "wake up" has fallen asleep at the switch. I don't mean to suggest that there are easy answers to the problems the film depicts, but to go down the road that it takes seems to me to go down a road to nowhere, avoiding the hard decisions that its characters refuse to face.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Beautifully mastered, Columbia Tri-Star's Get on the Bus DVD deserves props for its deceptive video transfer alone, which makes the Super16 production look of 35mm origin–except when Elliot Davis's cinematography purposefully emphasizes the stock's grainy potential, of course. 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and pan-and-scan versions occupy the flipper; a pinprick-clear 5.0 Dolby Digital mix, whose music engulfs us, accompanies both sides, as does a surprisingly banal Spike Lee commentary. After a fiery, promising opening, Lee reduces himself to repeating dialogue ("Shabuya!"), or worse, singing along to the soundtrack. Worthwhile observations ("We can be a homophobic race") are few and far between. The disc's finishing touches: talent files and a foldout insert.

121 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.0, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; Columbia TriStar