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If you listen to most critics, Bamboozled is a flop, a muddled mess of a satire that can't decide on its targets and can't hit those it picks. Even my friend Garth, usually a reliable guide on all things film, complained that Spike Lee's latest picture was too scatter-shot to be effective. Excuse me, Garth, if I disagree.

Yes, Bamboozled is a wild affair. Damon Wayans (In Living Color) plays Pierre Delacroix, a television writer who, when challenged to come up with "real" black entertainment, decides to satire the entire endeavor by creating a "minstrel show for the new millennium." He chooses two street performers as his stars--"two real coons . . . who are ignorant, lazy, and unlucky." To Delacroix's dismay, the pilot episode is not only picked up by an enthusiastic network, but the show itself becomes an enormous hit, with fans donning black-face in imitation of its stars.

The stars of the show are two street performers that Delacroix has picked out of obscurity. He changes their names to Mantan (tap legend Savion Glover) and Sleep 'N Eat (Tommy Davidson, Woo). At first, the two are
nervous about donning the ridiculous caricatures ("we're going to need more money for this"), but soon they're embracing their success. Even Delacroix starts to enjoy the ride. In one savagely funny scene, he imagines
accepting an Emmy as "the grateful Negro"--his speech is a brutal satire of Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Ving Rhames's famous acceptance speeches.

This aspect of satiring black as well as white culture is even more amplified in two commercials: one for a malt liquor called The Bomb, another for Timmy Hillnigger jeans. The latter is particularly scalding as it lampoons blacks who embrace a clothing line that denigrates them.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in last week's Chicago Reader took Lee to task for having "few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs" in the movie. But that analysis misses the point entirely. Bamboozled is wrestling with the very issue of what it means to be a black "entertainer" in a white society--where almost all avenues of distribution are controlled by white conglomerates whose ideas of what's black are profoundly different from those of the black artist.

The early scenes between Delacroix and television executive Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport in a great, over-the-top performance) are particularly useful here. Delacroix, who has tried to deny his black heritage (he adopts
a ridiculous French accent), is challenged by Dunwitty to "dig deep into his blackness." When Delacroix responds he doesn't know what that means, the tv exec states that he's "more up with black people" than Delacroix is.
As proof, Dunwitty points to the dozen framed portraits of black sports heroes on his walls. Later when the two are discussing where the television show should take place, Delacroix's first idea--in the projects--is shot down as too obvious. Dunwitty offers a plantation as an alternative and then erupts with glee when Delacroix proposes a watermelon patch. Dunwitty ostensibly recognizes the satire involved but doesn't, in any way, grasp the deep hostility behind Delacroix's fatuous suggestion.

As Lee provocatively shows, blacks and whites are not only speaking different languages about race, but they're trying to translate for each other. This inevitably leads to miscommunication and one side or the other taking offense. A clear example of that occurs when Dunwitty and Delacroix are discussing the "n-word." Dunwitty, like many white people, can't understand why he can't use that word when he hears black people using it all the time. Delacroix tries to explain but can't. 

This contrast becomes clearer when Delacroix goes to visit his father, a comedian who performs exclusively in black clubs. For the only time in the movie, Bamboozled slows down to a normal, even subdued, pace, and Delacroix drops the French accent and pretentious manner. It's as if Delacroix (and Lee) is finally on comfortable ground--he's speaking a language he knows and, more importantly, he knows that the people around him understand. No translator is needed.

This scene also hearkens to Spike Lee's other 2000 film, The Original Kings of Comedy. That movie was unabashedly a black movie for black audiences, just as the father's act is in Bamboozled. It didn't worry about speaking a different language or worry about how it was being perceived. Bamboozled, on the other hand, is a movie about being black for a white audience, and how that is so much different and more complicated. When Delacroix asks his father, "how'd you end up here?," the father responds that he had "too much pride, too much dignity, integrity. I couldn't do that Hollywood. I couldn't say what they wanted me to say." If that's not self-criticism, I'm not sure what is. It's also a testimony to the difficulties black artists face. Do you segregate yourself and end up preaching to the choir, or do you jump into the white-dominated culture of packaged entertainment and risk losing your identity? As Delacroix says at the end, "people pay for what they do and, more importantly, by what they allow themselves to become."

I'll agree with other critics that the final twenty minutes of Bamboozled does run off the rails with a ridiculous kidnapping /execution sequence, but the rest of the film is so thought-provoking and telling about the difficulties of making a black film for a white audience that I didn't care. I also didn't particularly care that neither of the two leads--Wayans and Jada Pinkett-Smith--are particularly strong, or that some of Lee's targets are too obvious to be effective. Even the fuzzy digital-video camerawork can't undermine the power of Spike Lee's vision. Bamboozled is a furious, provocative work on the state of race relations today. Taken with the Original Kings of Comedy, it provides a necessary counterpoint to the idea that it's easy to just all get along. 

J. Robert Parks