Do The Right Thing takes place over the course of a singular day in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The heat is sweltering, but people still have to get up and head off to their jobs. One guy trying to do just that is Mookie (Spike Lee), a guy living with his sister who works as a delivery man for the local pizza shop run by Sal (Danny Aiello). Mookie is the character we follow for the majority of the day as he goes about his deliveries and runs into an assortment of his friends, including Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and troublemaker Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), though we do get individual segments following other characters going about their daily business.
Some of these other individuals we follow including the elderly Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), who spends his day consuming liquor and walking up and down the block, the highly-respected Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), who gazes upon the neighborhood from her window and even interactions between Sal and his two sons, Pino (John Turturro), who harbors intense hatred for black people and the more naive Vito (Richard Edson). Their interactions all lead up to a nighttime climax that has racial-oriented tensions that have been bubbling under the surface all day coming to the surface in a horrifying way.
Spike Lee's script has a sprawling cast that reinforces just how many people call Bedford-Stuyvesant home in addition to Mookie. All of the numerous cast members are well-balanced by Do The Right Thing, which has its runtime comprised by a number of extensive conversation pieces that allow the individual personalities of the various players in the story to shine through. Sometimes these come about in more comedic exchanges, such as Mother Sister's indignation to Da Mayor trying to strike up small talk to her or the amusing sight of local DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) being visibly indignant that his delivery from Sal's hasn't come yet while Mookie and Vito obliviously chit-chat with his order in their hands.
Other times, we get more dramatic conversations, many of them revolving around racial tensions between the various denizens of the area. Most memorably, there's an extended piece wherein the camera slowly zooms in on a character in the middle of the frame as they spew racially-tinged insults at specific minorities or groups of people that they harbor contentment for. On a visual level, it's incredibly memorable and a creative way to depict this way of characters expressing their internal monologues. It's also fascinating how we're supposed to take different things away from each of these tirades, with Mookie's showing him expressing all the contempt he feels toward all the crap Pino gives him, demonstrating what kind of anger he must fight against expressing just to hold onto a job, while the camera slowly getting closer to Pino as he unleashes a tidal wave of enraged racist slurs has this chilling effect both in the dialogue being spoken and the way the camera takes us closer and closer to him as Pino gets angrier and angrier.
There's a lot of thoughtful camera work like that to be found in Do The Right Thing and it's great that Spike Lee took a chance and went the unorthodox route of having characters talk directly to the camera in certain moments with another notable example of this phenomenon coming in the iconic scene of Radio Raheem explaining to Mookie his Love/Hate brass knuckles. Further evidence of masterful camera work can be found in the recurring use of high-angle and low-angle shots in dialogue exchanges which are used to visually solidify which person has the most authority or power in a given conversation. It's quite clear that Spike Lee is not only creating some great dialogue but also showing some real skill in visually depicting characters delivering that dialogue in a memorable manner.
The assorted actors here are primarily comprised of a number of actors who would go onto become major stars in the then future decade of the 1990's. Seeing noticeably younger versions of actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Giancarlo Esposito and John Turturro is a shocking experience but these three and others in the movie do demonstrate why they'd go on to be such prolific actors with their mighty fine work here. I was trying to figure out the whole movie which actor was playing Mookie as I didn't recognize him only to find out in the credits that Spike Lee himself was the one playing the lead role, a part he plays quite well. The best of the cast is handily Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, a warm spirit whose both amusing and heartbreaking to watch in equal measure.
It's great, too, how Davis is able to walk around in the background in certain shots in a way that feels true to the character while not drawing too much attention to himself. This is something the majority of the cast does actually as the background of many shots in Do The Right Thing have established supporting players chit-chatting in the background or huddled in the corner, yet another excellent way this movie is able to make the world Mookie and his neighbors inhabit feel incredibly authentic. All of those well-established realistic characters help make the movies gut-punch of a climax all the more powerful. It's a brutal way to close out a motion picture but for the phenomenal Do The Right Thing, it feels like the appropriate way to end a movie this thoughtful and this considerate of reality.
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