King's Ransom: HIGHEST 2 LOWEST

You’d never accuse a Spike Lee film of doing too little. Even a movie as relatively lean and focused as Highest 2 Lowest, a melancholic crime thriller, is overflowing with ideas. It’s not one of his State of the Union films stuffed with commentary on every contemporary concern, but Lee is so unfailingly current that it nonetheless plugs into a well-observed confluence of anxieties. Here he’s remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, itself adapted from Ed McBain’s pulp novel King’s Ransom. Each version is almost forensically interested in the haves and have nots of a particular place and time. Lee transplants the plot into modern day New York, where the business tycoon in the palatial penthouse apartment with a wall of windows is a music mogul played by Denzel Washington. He brings his usual charismatic combination of intimidation and charm, here starting at imperiously confident, dials up to false bravado and down to genuine doubt, discovering renewed intensities and determination as the line between risk and reward gets vertiginous. He’s secretly negotiating to leverage his life’s savings to buy back shares in his company to head off his partners’ interest in selling the whole thing off to corporate vultures who’ll feed it to the algorithm. It’s a tension between the human touch record executive and the soulless asset extraction of easy paydays. “All money ain't good money,” Washington warns. It’s in this moment of financial precarity that his 17-year-old son is kidnapped outside a basketball camp. Then comes the ransom request: $17.5 million. Paydays all the way down. Anyone familiar with the story’s earlier iterations won’t be surprised by most of the twists and turns that follow. But Lee’s telling makes them his own with the specificity of New York, and digs into Washington’s character in ways that complicate the construction of moral dilemmas around him. 

The twin questions of paying the ransom and finding renewed artistic authenticity find a neatly paired suspense, and Lee works them through tense negotiations and investigations toward some fine-tuned answers that are both surprising and inevitable. He gives the telling such a relaxed style here, less insistent and forceful than his peak, with low-key simmer that nearly swallows up important beats as it builds to some ecstatic aesthetic moments and his usual citational energy. It starts with a slow, dreamy montage of daybreak skyline shot in gleaming digital precision and set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” covered by Norm Lewis. There the movie’s concerns are laid out in one elegant moment: the camera drifting away from the streets and toward a luxury apartment (adorned with portraits of Ali, Basquiat, Morrison, and more) while a typically white Broadway ballad is lifted up by a famous black voice. It's all there: New York as a vector of race and class, business and art. Later a police chase on street and subway will be intercut with the Puerto Rican day parade, the soundtrack blending a band’s percussive music with baseball fans chanting “Let’s go, Yankees!” Lee keeps up overlapping layers of New Yorker experience, building tensions between Washington and his colleagues, his investors, cops, his driver (Jeffrey Wright), a striving low-level rapper (A$AP Rocky). And then he locates the tensions between all of them, too, the suspicions and fears and jealousies that motivate and separate. But it’s all done in a pretty casual style, tossed off in the margins of behaviors and montage as the movie builds to its conclusions. Lee’s typically bold, restless style is here so chill and relaxed, riffing on the High and Low while percolating at its own pace, then switching up the look and feel, going from cold sleek digital to grainy film stock and back again. He gets layers out of every choice, and can make even less seem like more. His characters here, all trapped in hustles of their own making on the hunt for something more real, are trying to get there, too.