In The Mood

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MO' BETTER BLUES

Directed and Written by Spike Lee

Moral controversy is often the filmmaker's friend. If you can get people spinning their wheels about whether your characters did good or bad when confronting a hot contemporary issue, you can usually distract them from your deficiencies as a craftsman.

It worked for Spike Lee last year with Do the Right Thing. The discussion then was all about whether or not the film endorsed a violent response to racism, not about the quality of the work. His new movie, Mo' Better Blues, is stirring a less commercially useful controversy, having been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for its portrayal of a pair of scuzzy jazz-club owners as anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Come to think of it, they are. But, come to think of it, almost everyone else in a Spike Lee movie is a stereotype too. That's what crude, careless sensibilities like Lee's deal in. He means to be affable here and pay some sort of tribute to the world of his father Bill, a jazzman who wrote the film's score. But despite firsthand knowledge, his story of how the career of trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington) is undone by pride, womanizing and unwise affection for a shiftless manager (played by Lee) is conventionally romantic, and so is his realization of its 'round-midnight atmosphere.

Lee sometimes writes good, quirky little exchanges, but precisely because his characters are so simplified, dramatic incident does not grow organically. So the film's movement is fitful and arbitrary -- all mood swings and unpersuasive melodrama. It makes you restless waiting for something to happen and restive trying to explain its emotional and narrative logic when it finally arrives. Lee needs to think things through. If he did, the A.D.L. would have nothing to say to him. And he might be a filmmaker worth conjuring with instead of an annual media sensation. R.S.