The most popular movie of Spike Lee’s career: “That’s the film people love”
Trying to define a filmmaker’s best work often feels futile. There are too many ways to measure greatness, and reducing a creative legacy to one simple highlight never tells the full story. Spike Lee understands that well.
How can we figure out the best or most definitive work of a filmmaker? There are the box office stats, but if that’s the case, David Lynch’s best effort is officially Dune, and that’s certainly not the case. Or, it can all come down to award wins, but again, we know that is a fickle business where some of the greatest movie makers of all time, including Lee himself, have been snubbed.
Even when discussing the all-time greats, alongside whom Lee has more than earned his place, it’s all subjective. Different people will remember an artist from different things, and it doesn’t always transpire that the most popular film, in terms of gross income or accolades, is the one that people remember years down the line. It’s all in the impact, and even Lee was surprised at the project of his that seems to have made the biggest impression.
Perhaps the best measure of a director’s best work is simply the people on the street and the day-to-day conversations they end up having with fans and admirers. The movies they bring up first, or mention as their favourite, should be tallied up over time so a genuine response to the question can be gathered through the most common answer.
From the outside, the answer regarding Lee’s best picture might be obvious as one of his biggest or best-known hits, but according to the fans he passes, it’s a different story as the director said, “When people come up, total strangers come up to me, more people say Crooklyn than any other film,” adding, “More than Do the Right Thing, more than Malcolm X.”
Beating out the movie that made his name, and then the biopic that put him on a huge mainstream stage, Lee kept finding that those big league productions in his history weren’t the ones people wanted to talk about. Instead, they wanted to focus on his 1994 semi-autobiographical flick, Crooklyn, which is a family comedy-drama written alongside his siblings.
Clearly, something about that picture truly connected with people, for “that’s the film people love, and not just Black folks,” he said, as the audience of people stopping him in the street to share their love for it is broad.
In his eyes, that all comes down to the relationships, as he said simply, “It’s that family”, believing those relationships to be the reason why it had such a hook on people and has stayed a favourite.
Crooklyn wasn’t an award winner, though, nor was it even nominated or perform all that well in terms of the box office or critical reviews, but regardless of those easy categories, it’s a movie that has heart, and that hits people in the heart, so when considering an artist’s best, that can never be disregarded.
