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The collaboration between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington has spanned four decades and tackled many aspects of African American life. But Lee feels their latest venture, the kidnap drama Highest 2 Lowest, will probably be the duo’s swansong.
“This is the fifth one we’ve done together,” Lee said after the picture’s premiere at the Cannes film festival. “It has been a blessing, this body of work between us, doing films that people love. And I think this is it. He’s been talking about retirement. But five films together: that’s good, they stand up.”
Highest 2 Lowest is a pacy New York thriller that stars the 70-year-old Washington as David King, a millionaire music mogul who is forced to take action after his assistant’s son is abducted in a case of mistaken identity. The film is a loose adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama High and Low, which was itself adapted from a 1959 novel by Ed McBain.
Lee and Washington first collaborated on the 1990 jazz drama Mo’ Better Blues before going on to make Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man. Washington was Oscar-nominated for his performance as Malcolm X but wound up losing the prize to Al Pacino in The Scent of a Woman. It’s a decision by voters that still rankles with Lee. “What he did with that film was amazing,” he said. “No disrespect to my brother Al Pacino – I love him. But Denzel in my opinion should have won.”
This is Washington’s first appearance at Cannes, where he was on hand to receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Lee, however, has enjoyed a long history with the festival. He first visited with his 1986 debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It, and served as jury president at the Covid-struck summer festival of 2021. The director credited Cannes with helping to send his career stratospheric by including his controversial race riot drama Do the Right Thing in the main competition in 1989.
“It started in Cannes and then went to America,” he said. “People said Do the Right Thing would cause riots and that black people would go insane. New York magazine was telling people to hope to God that this film doesn’t open in your neighbourhood. It was pure, blatant racism. And all of those people have been proved wrong over the years.”
Highest 2 Lowest is unlikely to provoke the same level of outrage. It’s a glossy, high-concept affair, complete with swooping drone shots of the Manhattan skyline and a climactic fight scene on a downtown subway train. Nonetheless, the cast felt that its themes of ambition, greed and selfism implicitly speak to the state of Trump’s America.
“That’s the world we are living in now, where everybody is for sale and everything is transactional,” said actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays the role of King’s assistant, Uncle Paul. “I think we can do better. Look back at the films [Lee] has made. Look at what Malcolm X was talking about. We come from a tradition that wasn’t about what you could do for yourself but what you could do for your community. That wasn’t about money, it was more about love.”
