31 Movies of May, Day 20: Crooklyn

May 20th viewing: Crooklyn, chosen by PEACOCK, the new streaming service from NBC Universal that I just discovered I somehow have

Year of Release: 1994

Directed by: Spike Lee

Written by: Joie Lee and Spike Lee & Cinque Lee

Starring: Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris, Carlton Williams, Sharif Rashed, Tse-Mach Washington, Christopher Knowlings, 

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Temporal Purgatory (American Pale Ale, 5.9% ABV), 18th Street Brewery, Hammond, Indiana
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)

Spike Lee and Greta Gerwig do not get brought up together in conversation much, for reasons that I imagine are pretty clear. But maybe the thing that struck me most about Crooklyn, Lee’s immediate follow-up to his seminal Malcolm X biopic, was that it felt like a direct antecedent to Lady Bird, Gerwig’s feature directorial breakthrough. 

This is likely due to the general dearth of movies made about mothers and daughters, and the even greater dearth of films that focus directly on a mother-daughter relationship and treat it with gravitas, as both Crooklyn and Lady Bird do. A quick search of listicles on the topic pulled up movies like Freaky Friday, Stepmom, and Mamma Mia! as some of the most common offerings, and while all three of those movies have their virtues, they all approach the subject in a somewhat removed way by nature of their more high-concept premises. Crooklyn, by contrast with those other films but in unison with Lady Bird, is a semi-autobiographical slice of life, thus grounding it more to reality and allowing it to explore motherhood and daughterhood more realistically. 

It helps that Crooklyn is anchored by the terrific performance of Alfre Woodard, playing Carolyn, the mother of five kids in a Brooklyn brownstone. The film doesn’t take any shortcuts to win sympathy for Carolyn - she’s shown right off the bat to be a hardass mom, but the consistency of her disciplinary nature creates natural respect for her quickly enough. The family dynamics at play create a deeper picture of her as the story proceeds, particularly in regard to Carolyn’s husband, Woody, played by Delroy Lindo. Woody comes across as a present and loving father, but he fairly clearly sluffs much of the actual parenting onto Carolyn, while additionally further burdening his wife by continuing to pursue his artistic dreams as a musician while she serves as the family’s primary breadwinner.

All of this plays into the oft adversarial yet affectionate relationship between Carolyn and her only daughter, Troy (Troy being a stand-in for Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, who co-wrote the screenplay). By the end of the film, you can tell just how much work Carolyn put into not only taking care of her children, but in modeling womanhood for her daughter so that she could achieve for herself and, ultimately, fill some of the void left following Carolyn’s untimely passing. It results in the incredibly sweet image at the end of the film, with Troy making her youngest brother, Nate, look presentable to go play outside, sending him off with similar directions to what Carolyn had provided her earlier in the film.

Back when Lady Bird was released and got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, Academy prognosticators observed that were it to win, Lady Bird would be the first film chiefly about a female relationship to win that award since Terms of Endearment in 1984, another film focusing on a mother and her daughter. That’s a more than 30 year (and growing, due to Lady Bird going home from the Oscars empty-handed) gap between Best Picture winners that happen to be about two women. Maybe if we had more films like Crooklyn mining that very rich subject matter, the next Best Picture winner of that regard could come sooner rather than later.