plug: Da 5 Bloods (2020)
"We've been dying for this country from the very get, hoping one day they'd give us our rightful place."
Hey everyone, been a while. Wasn’t planning on returning from a hiatus like this, but death continues to drive the state of things in the worst of ways and I didn’t want to let too much time pass without tipping my hat to Chadwick Boseman, a great actor who inhabited a mammoth presence, both on-screen and in the culture, with incredible strength and illuminating grace. He died of cancer on Friday at the age of 43. It’s weird, the more sentences like that I read online when a public figure passes away or in an obituary when a loved one does the more uncanny they are to behold. There’s just no “getting used to it.” Especially in a year as relentless and truly dystopian as this.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole but find a small number of MCU films, or at least aspects of them, not only interesting but sometimes even worth the attention they’re given. One of the many virtues of 2016’s Black Panther — certainly among the best and most inventive MCU movies — was its top-to-bottom stellar cast. Michael B. Jordan’s loud, showy villain performance took up a lot of the conversation upon the film’s release, but even then, as a fan of what Jordan did in the movie, there was no question in my mind that Boseman was the major force. I don’t think anyone could’ve imbued the role of T’Challa with everything it needed to work the way Boseman did, and he’s just dynamite to watch on screen in a way very few actors have been.
Boseman’s warm, royal persona was put to miraculous use in Spike Lee’s excellent and vitally important Da 5 Bloods, and in the wake of the actor’s unfathomable passing, the role takes on a whole new weight and sobering grandeur. The film is about four Black veterans who return to Vietnam to find the remains of their fallen squad leader, Stormin’ Norman (Boseman), and the hidden fortune of recovered CIA gold that they left behind.
Boseman’s role in the film is, by design, ancillary to the main action. In a series of flashbacks, Stormin’ Norman manifests as the moral, emotional, and spiritual core of the story — equal parts righteous anger and unflinching discretion in the face of national betrayal. Watch this clip narrated by Spike Lee in which the director breaks down one of Boseman’s major scenes, drawn from the experiences of real Black soldiers in Vietnam forced to reckon with Martin Luther King’s assassination.
If you haven’t yet seen Da 5 Bloods, its timely remix of American and cinema history (in typical Spike Lee fashion) is well worth your time. If you’ve seen it already, consider rewatching for Boseman’s performance. Like all of Boseman’s work, it demonstrates a clear preoccupation with illuminating the Black experience and embodying unshakable charisma, power, and poise in the face of degradation. What an incredible thing for an actor to have dedicated his career to.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Boseman’s speech to the 2018 graduating class of Howard University, his alma mater:
Purpose crosses disciplines. Purpose is an essential element of you. It is the reason you are on the planet at this particular time in history. Your very existence is wrapped up in the things you are here to fulfill (…) When I dared to challenge the system that would relegate us to victims and stereotypes with no clear historical backgrounds, no hopes or talents, when I questioned that method of portrayal, a different path opened up for me, the path to my destiny.