The movie Ethan Hawke calls a “masterpiece”
Many actors spend their entire careers hunting down career-defining roles, hoping to add a masterpiece to their resume. For Ethan Hawke, those projects seem inescapable. Since making his feature film debut opposite River Phoenix in 1985’s Explorers, Hawke has honed one of the most consistent and considered filmographies in Hollywood.
Hawke’s tendency towards greatness proved evident from the very beginning of his career, as he found his second film role in the heart-breaking Dead Poets Society. Since then, his career has been consistently littered with masterpieces, from the realistic romanticism of the Before trilogy to the ambitious Boyhood to the solemn First Reformed.
With more masterpieces to his name than most, there are few people more qualified to judge the merit of movie-making than Hawke. His tastes have proven to be just as well-honed as his own work, as he once declared Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing a “masterpiece”.
Amidst the heat of a Brooklyn-based pizza parlour, the film discusses American race relations in the wake of a real-life racial attack at Howard Beach, Queens, that took place just a few years earlier. Over three decades on from its first release, the commentary at the heart of Do the Right Thing remains just as relevant as it was at the time.
During a conversation with Aframe, Hawke picked out the film as one of the five to have changed his life, sharing how it immediately stunned him upon first watch. “I think that Do The Right Thing is a masterpiece,” he began, “I remember walking out of the movie theater and I just couldn’t talk to anybody. I couldn’t speak.”
Hawke was amazed by how Lee balanced the personal and the political, declaring that Do The Right Thing “doesn’t have an agenda with you besides the truth”. But alongside the weightiness of the film, Hawke also commended Lee’s capabilities for comedy. “And it’s so funny, and the use of color,” he enthused, “It was Spike Lee finding his absolute original voice and just throttling you with the truth”
Do The Right Thing certainly did establish Lee as an auteur, marking the beginning of the ‘Spike Lee joint’, a term that encompasses all the essential elements of his filmmaking style. 35 years later, the very first Spike Lee joint still holds just as much weight, as Hawke was keen to acknowledge.
Attending an anniversary screening of the film, he recalled how “painful” its continuing timeliness was. “It was a painful reality,” he concluded, “And that’s what great art can do.”
Revisit the trailer for Do The Right Thing below.
