Malcolm X.

On remarkable thing about the remarkable life of Malcolm X is the way it so facilely lends itself to a four-act dramatic structure, each act corresponding to a phase of the black leader's life (leaving the all-important childhood years to be skimmed by flashbacks). The hero even bears a different name through each phase. Act 1: Malcolm Little, alias Detroit Red, spends his adolescence gambling, pimping, drug-dealing, and stealing. Result: a prison sentence of ten years (six served). Act 2: the convict, whose name is now his prisoner number, is regenerated by his conversion to a homegrown sect of Islam. Act 3: Malcolm X (the letter standing for his slavery-obliterated African name) becomes a minister of Allah and ace evangelist for Elijah Muhammad and enjoys the happiest years of his public and private life until charges of lechery against his leader initiate Malcolm's alienation from the Nation of Islam. Last act: Malcolm, now calling himself El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, determines to remain true to the tenets of his faith while suffering the abomination of his former coreligionists (and possibly their fatwa) and finally meeting the death he himself foresaw and perhaps subconsciously welcomed.

In short, here is a life marked by those sudden, breathtaking reversals of perception and fortune that are the stuff of high drama. Does Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X, encompass the variety, the spectacle, and the complex emotionality of the life?

Lee has taken just measure of the story and has given it the sweep, the attention to detail, the forward motion, and the sense of the epic it must have just to register as entertainment, much less art. He and his cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, have made images not only memorable in themselves but wonderfully revelatory of the story. A few examples:

The very first shot of the movie shows, looming over a downtown black district, a billboard featuring a white beauty leering down at passers-by as she proclaims the value of the advertised product. Later, when Malcolm shows off the "conk" that a pal has given him to straighten his hair and hopefully asks, "Looks white, don't it'?" we remember that white amazon of paper and paste grinning down at black men who must look up at her.

After menacing the child Malcolm and his family in their Nebraskan cabin, Klan night riders gallop away toward a horizon dominated by a moon so huge and low in the sky that it seems as if the white-hooded terrorists must drive their horses right onto it. In the eyes of a four-year-old, these brutal lunatics are transcendently evil, otherworldly, literally lunar. Thus, one image paves the way for the adult Malcolm's perception of all white people as "devils."

Toward the end, Malcolm's farewell to his trusted aid, Earl, is shot in static medium distance, but when the men rise to embrace, Lee cuts in three big close-ups that make the parting reverberate.

And I feel admiration for most of Lee's telescopings, elisions, and stylizations of facts, at least all those accomplished for the sake of economy and poetic force, rather than making abrasive material palatable to a mass audience.

But, though there are memorable images throughout the movie there is a marked difference in achievement between its first half, retailing the incidents of criminality and reform, and its second half of public achievement and private happiness terminated by schism and bullets. The first half is jazzy, mercurial, rambunctious; the second half is often impressive, just as often labored, gelid, self-consciously noble. The whole film has been well planned but only the first half is vividly felt. Lee's head and heart work together in the first section but the second is entirely a product of the head.

Lee, a bard of street life and a connoisseur of sex and aggression, knows how to convey the violence and squalid glamour of Malcolm's criminal days. And, in his gangster tux and with a cigarette dangling from one corner of the mouth, Denzel Washington is Clark Gable come again. But this is a menacingly impassive Gable. Washington has a knack, whenever his character is in danger or is about to strike out, of keeping his head very still and letting his eyes go vacant. It's the stillness before an explosion. In scenes such as the one in which Malcolm quells a rebellion in his burglary ring by forcing a rival to play Russian roulette with him, Washington helps Lee achieve just the sort of glinting, moonlight-in-the-gutter poetry we get from classic gangster movies. And, as the crime lord, Delroy Lindo has the power of an aging yet still feral panther.

The ensuing prison scenes have a different sort of power, claustrophobic and isometric, that is appropriate both to the prison setting and to the rage that first seethes within the hero, then turns him into the firebrand that the public came to know.

It is at this point, the emergence of Malcolm X the orator and propagandist, that Spike Lee and the movie run into trouble. The crowd scenes are staged competently (though with no great inventiveness), and Washington continues to score as he conveys his character's rage with an amused iciness that seems to amplify the anger rather than mitigate it. The basic problem seems to be that Lee's peculiar artistry, functioning beautifully in the portrayal of Detroit Red, ceases to respond, in some fundamental way, to Malcolm X, sword of Allah. So Lee fakes it with stilted charm, conventional spectacle, and staging that is little better than what one sees in TV docudramas. The movie continues to move right along but it no longer sears.

The courtship scenes between Malcolm and future wife Betty are embarrassingly coy and spiritless, reminiscent of those scenes in Gandhi in which the Indian leader's celibate marriage is depicted as a union between overgrown teddy bears. Angela Bassett is such a good actress that she manages to give Betty a dram of humanity but, much of the time, she falls into the same trap that awaits all actors playing paragons: she aligns her spine and radiates SERIOUSNESS.

The scenes between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad (silkily played by Al Freeman, Jr.) should have been Dostoevskian in matter and manner. Love, awe, fear, fanaticism, inklings of the supernatural, the tremulousness of faith-a-borning, and the scent of murder-to-be might have converged here and been layered in such a way that the viewer could feel that he was being submerged, little by little, into the depths of character. In the first meeting of prophet and disciple, Washington strikes the right note by approaching his master doubled over in trepidation, a true believer nearly crippled by his true belief. But nothing to come in the script matches this moment of inspired acting. Even the scene that should have been the turning point of the movie - the confrontation over the accusation of lechery against Elijah - seems a pale rendering of what might have happened, for it only reproduces the externals of Malcolm's account in his autobiography without letting us feel his torment.

And if the depths of torment aren't sounded, neither are the heights of religious fervor scaled. The all-important pilgrimage to Mecca where Malcolm underwent a second spiritual conversion when he discovered that Muslims of all colors could eat, talk, pray, and live amiably together, is factually rendered in this film, but the style of the sequence never goes beyond that of a well-made travelogue. All those camels, all those pyramids, all those merchants in turbans duly put in an appearance while Malcolm, reading a letter home on the soundtrack, recounts his discoveries. Though we hear about the beneficial spiritual shock, we never see or feel it. In dramatic terms, it goes for nothing.

But there are brilliant scenes in the weaker half of Malcolm X just as there are duds in the first, successful half. To enumerate successful and unsuccessful moments does not explain why Malcolm X splits right down the middle.

To put it in a nutshell: while watching the life of Malcolm the gangster in this film, we are inside his consciousness. We jerk away with him from the bullets of his foes; we feel his contempt and his lust for his white girlfriend; we suffer the darkness of his solitary cell and discover, with him and through his eyes, the expressive power of words. But once Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm X, we are outside his consciousness. We watch the pageantry of Muslim oratory and Harlem crowds and enjoy the figure of stem puritanical magnetism that Denzel Washington presents; but we never feel what his character feels. Midcourse, Spike Lee's film turns from intense psychological melodrama into handsome iconography.

White movie critics have rushed into print to assure white audiences that they will find this movie irresistible ("A movie for all people!" - Siskel and Ebert). But what they haven't noticed is that there is something about Malcolm X that resists the black film-maker Spike Lee. And that something is the unrelenting puritanism of the man. You don't hire a hipster, no matter how talented, to make a movie about Savonarola.