Spike Lee and Denzel Washington started working together before either of them were cultural institutions, and under Lee’s direction, Washington has played a jazz musician, an imprisoned basketball player, a hostage negotiator and, of course, Malcolm X. In Highest 2 Lowest, their fifth collaboration, Washington plays (fittingly) an old-timer with a lifetime’s worth of work already under his belt.
He’s a legendary record executive known as King David, who we’re told was blessed with golden ears but whose musical tastes haven’t aligned with the public’s in awhile. His kingdom is already on shaky ground when he gets a disturbing call. His teenage son has been kidnapped, and the ransom is $17.5 million. That amount of money will clean him out. But he’s backed into a corner.
The basics of this premise are taken from the 1959 Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom, which Akira Kurosawa turned into the 1963 film High and Low. If you’re familiar with those, then you’ll know the next complication: that a poor man’s son has been mistaken for the rich man’s, but the kidnapper still wants the rich man’s money.
Kurosawa’s film trapped us in the rich man’s house for nearly an hour, which is when the plight of the wealthy executive, played by Toshiro Mifune, is overshadowed by the details of the police investigation. Lee’s film, written by Alan Fox, has a similar structure, but its focus is entirely on King David. It isn’t until he breaks out of the glass-and-concrete cocoon of his penthouse apartment and high-rise office building that the movie finally explodes with life.
In fact, the first hour of Highest 2 Lowest is often awkward and clunky, filled with obvious expository dialogue. Lee has always overcranked the music in his movies, but he seriously overdoes it with the score here; it’s unrelenting and it’s sappy. And King David has been imbued with such unflagging nobility: Even when he mulls over the idea of not paying the ransom, we don’t believe he’s capable of such malevolence.
But the movie picks up as it goes along and its blood starts pumping. It really gets going with the elaborate handoff sequence, which involves a backpack stuffed with Swiss bank notes, a Puerto Rican Day parade, a bunch of angry Yankees fans, a fleet of black-clad motorcycle bandits and King David teetering between subway cars. There’s also an unsurprisingly rich supporting performance by Jeffrey Wright as David’s longtime friend and driver — and also happens to be the kidnapped boy’s father.
High and Low used the form of the police procedural to explore Japanese social strata, from business deals in the shiny house on the hill to drugs and depravity in the slums beneath the city. Highest 2 Lowest, meanwhile, uses the business of Black art as a backdrop for the rising barriers and cruel paradoxes of Black socioeconomic prosperity. The priceless Basquiats adorning King David’s walls clue us into his level of wealth, but they’re also making a satirical point.
In a movie full of sometimes head-scratching, sometimes exhilarating choices, the steady presence of Denzel Washington holds it together. For all the flashy edits and music, he’s Spike Lee’s greatest asset, and perhaps our greatest living movie star.