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People have been on Spike Lee's case about this movie for ignoring the
families of the victims, calling him insensitive to human issues, blah blah
blah. (In case you don't know what the movie is about - the summer of 1977,
when New York City was in an uproar over a serial killer who called himself
Son of Sam, kind of like London over Jack the Ripper.)
The movie was pretty damn good, and I'll explain why I think so. This is
not a movie trying to explain the mind of a killer; this movie has nothing to
do with families of victims. This movie is like a haiku, a vision of a moment
in time in New York, a story about 10 or so people and what it was like for
them to be alive at that time. To make their stories credible you have to
work in all the social issues of the time. This is what was done; he worked
in disco, the emerging punk undercurrent, drugs, crime and the serial killer
that was on everybody's mind. The serial killer had to be put in because he
was a pertinent detail in the lives of these people. That does not mean he is
what the movie is about.
You can't work everything into a movie. For example, what about families
whose children got hooked on disco and cocaine and died, what about their
devastating loss? What about the hundreds of people that were killed in gang
warfare that summer -- they're not in the movie either. None of those
things are in the movie because that is not what it is about. The movie
starts and ends with a narrator who says - there are 8 million stories in New
York City, here's ONE.
I do think the movie could have been better, because at certain points it
does seem like the serial killer motif is not as relevant to the characters'
lives as everything else, somewhere it seemed artificial. It could have had
more reinforcement in the plot and the movie would've been more logically
pulled together. However, the main purpose of a movie is a fictionalized
portrayal of how people would actually be acting in reality. This means:
cause and effect, event and response, realistic and consistent interaction
between characters. All this makes a movie real, and the movie is real and
alive. This is so rarely accomplished that I don't think it's something to
sneeze at and underestimate. (It is also well written, acted, filmed,
etc.)
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