That dog is what finally causes the movie to fall over the edge, from being overproduced and scattershot into being plain silly. The scene involves Berkowitz on his hands and knees in his apartment, and the dog comes through the door and, thanks to computer-generated effects, actually starts talking like a demented reject from the cast of Babe (1995). It’s a scene that should not have been literalized, and it serves as an extreme example of everything that is wrong with the movie as a whole.

This is not to say that Summer of Sam is all bad. It certainly has its moments, and director/co-writer Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, He Got Game) should be given credit for creating a gritty image of urban life during a record-breaking heat wave in New York City in the summer of 1977. However, everything that is good about Summer of Sam ultimately comes unhinged because Lee pushes his best impulses into overdrive. Although Lee has always tended toward stylistic overkill, here he goes right over the brink. In combining just about every stylistic flourish imaginable—from sweeping crane shots, to jittery, hand-held cameras, to tilting and spinning angles and distorted images, all of which is shot in grainy, slightly overexposed film stock—Lee turns the film into a messy cinematic buffet. A little neorealism here, some surrealism there, a tracking shot inspired by GoodFellas (1990), a disco-infused soundtrack worthy of Boogie Nights (1997), Silence of the Lambs-style horror—it all adds up to too much. At one point, Lee almost brings the movie to a grating stop in order to interject a montage of scenes cut to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; the scene plays more like a misplaced pumped-up music video than a necessary piece of the narrative, and it also emphasizes the film’s oddly misplaced understanding of punk music (the film’s punk-loving character would be more into the Sex Pistols or the Ramones, not The Who).

Of course, Summer of Sam would have been much more invigorating had it come complete with a narrative that could sustain such immense technical flourishes. Instead, Lee and co-screenwriters Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli (both of whom are experienced actors and first-time screenwriters) come up with a series of interconnected stories that follow various characters in the Bronx whose lives are somehow affected by Berkowitz’s killing spree. Chief among these is Vinny (John Leguizamo), whose self-serving sexual hang-ups about his wife (Mira Sorvino) lead him to cheat on her with scores of other women (or at least self-justifies it). Then there is Vinny’s friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody), whose recent submersion into the burgeoning punk scene and secret life of dancing at gay bars alienates him from his neighborhood friends and causes them to suspect that he is the so-called “.44-Caliber Killer.” Nestled into these stories are strands about Ritchie’s relationship with a neighborhood girl (Jennifer Esposito) dismissed by his friends as a “slut” and even a few scenes involving the local Mafia.

Lee does a fine job of rendering the seedy world these characters inhabit, but he fails at making us care about them. None of these characters are particularly sympathetic, and it’s difficult to become involved in their plights. And the film, at close to two and a half hours in length, constantly tries to get us worked up about the characters’ fears and dilemmas, some of which are inspired by the Son of Sam, some of which are the result of their own demented lifestyles, which creates a tapestry of misguided, self-serving male bravado (Vinny’s brash sexual hypocrisy is matched by his friends’ potentially lethal xenophobia regarding Ritchie, who despite his spiky hair and dog collars plays the closest thing the film has to an innocent).

Not surprisingly, then, the best parts of Summer of Sam involve Lee stepping back from the individual characters and looking at the culture as a whole, especially a scene when there is a blackout in all five boroughs of New York City, and the Italian Mafia gets the neighborhood to band together to protect itself while other neighborhoods around it self-destruct in looting and riots. He also creates a palpable sense of panic and fear, showing how a city of 16 million people could be literally brought to its knees by one madman.

The scenes involving David Berkowitz are harrowing, but not particularly original. We gets grimy close-ups and purposefully truncated shots of the overweight Berkowitz in his apartment, clawing at his head and literally going crazy while listening to the dog barking outside. (These scene work because we hear the dog barking, but are left to imagine for ourselves how Berkowitz’s mind is translating those sounds into “Kill, kill.” It is much more effective than the ridiculous scene showing the dog’s lips moving.) Like Jonathan Demme, Lee shows a surprisingly adept flair for exploiting horror genre conventions, and the sequences involving Berkowitz murdering his victims are sudden, violent, and a bit sickening. Unfortunately, the rest of the film comes nowhere close to achieving kind of emotional impact.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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