Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece “High and Low” – a gripping drama about class stratification, and morality, and whether the choices we make really matter – is the last movie that warrants a remake. But, for as much as Spike Lee’s new film “Highest 2 Lowest” follows almost the exact same structure as its inspiration, it’s amazing what a different voice, different context, and different intentions can do.
The bare bones of the story are roughly the same: Toshiro Mifune’s shoe company executive Kingo Gondo becomes David King (Denzel Washington), a record company mogul with “the best ears in the business,” planning to buy back his label Stackin’ Hits out from under those who want to sell it off. That plan is halted, however, when a kidnapper – an aspiring rapper named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) takes David’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and asks for a ruinous amount of money to give him back. Things become more complicated when it’s revealed that the kidnapper made a mistake. The kid in question is not Trey, but rather Kyle (Elijah Wright): the son of David’s friend and chauffeur, Paul (Jeffrey Wright).
“High and Low” is a film about a man brought low, forced into a lose-lose situation where he must do a truly selfless act – AKA, one that not only does not benefit him, but arguably makes him worse off (“I did a good thing, but I don’t feel good,” David laments in “Highest 2 Lowest.”). As thrilling as it is, it’s not a movie that you could conceivably call “funny,” or a “good time.”
And yet somehow, Lee has turned this hard-bitten procedural into an exciting romp of a film. “Highest 2 Lowest” is part melodrama, part a troll of a morality tale, part a treatise on the intersection between art, commerce, and technology, and part a feverish love letter to New York City (at one point, a man on the subway screams “Boston sucks!” right down the barrel of the camera). And, for as much as “High and Low” almost skirts around the star persona at its center, “Highest 2 Lowest” gives Washington full rein to go buckwild.
“Highest 2 Lowest” opens with stunning aerial shots of New York City, all while Norm Lewis’ smooth baritone croons out “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” in the background. The classic song sets up a man who is almost stodgily (as much as Washington could ever be stodgy) old-fashioned, obsessed with recreating the past instead of moving toward the future. He’s corny, but also cranky (“The AI, the IA, the AEIOU,” he grumbles when someone brings up artificial intelligence). In the car with his son Trey, he jokingly asks him how much time he spends on his phone before ordering him to put it away, brushing aside Trey’s insistence that time spent on social media is valuable in this day and age.
David King’s introduction is a far cry from how Mifune’s character is presented to us in “High and Low,” and the way both directors weaponize their stars’ personas is interesting to consider. At the very beginning of “High and Low,” Mifune delivers a speech that makes the audience believe that Gondo probably should be the one running this shoe company. In contrast, David is losing his stride, refusing to listen to the new music his son collects for him, far more concerned with getting back to the way things used to be than discovering something new. During a conversation with his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), she reminds him how he used to walk for miles instead of taking the train or a cab, just so he could listen to as much music as possible. He’s lost that, and maybe that means it’s time to call it quits. But, for want of legacy, or power, or whatever it may be, he can’t give it up.
Gondo’s desire to take over the shoe company is similarly rooted in a place of greed, but “High and Low” takes the time to make you understand and believe in Gondo’s assertion that he’s the right man for the job. David is not as firmly positioned on the high ground. For the first half of “Highest 2 Lowest,” it almost feels like Lee is trolling the audience. The film is filled with many of Lee’s signatures (lots of cuts, showing the same action from different angles for emphasis), but instead of a fast-paced thriller, you’re watching some sort of perverted version of a morality play. Howard Drossin’s sentimental orchestral score plays earnestly underneath moments like one where David’s business partner (Michael Potts) has to explain to David that not paying the ransom for Paul’s son – something he was willing to do without question when his own child was in danger – will irreparably damage his reputation. David’s response is to wonder if the ever-changing news cycle won’t offer him some relief. People will move on from him allowing a child to be murdered in cold blood in about a week, won’t they?
There are moments of humor to be found throughout those first 40 or so minutes, but the whole routine can get a little tiresome, particularly given the fact that we know David will eventually give in and pay up. But Lee does manage to find nuance in many of the film’s main relationships, particularly the one between David and Paul.
Paul is David’s friend – David is even Paul’s son’s godfather – but he’s also David’s employee. Paul has a stint in jail under his belt, and as soon as the cops show up to help find Trey, they treat Paul like a suspect, even continuing to treat him warily when they learn it’s his child who has been taken. Money has always sat precariously between these two, but it was something they could ignore. Now that division, along with their stations in the world, has become tangible.
Divisions can be found all throughout “Highest 2 Lowest,” and the most interesting of those is not just the class divide, but the generational one, further emphasized by different characters’ relationships to technology. The attention economy is clearly something that Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox have thought about, and something that David has tried desperately to avoid. He routinely ignores things like the amount of followers an artist has, and a moment that mirrors the famous ending of “High and Low” hammers home the idea that no press is bad press to harrowing and comedic effect.
The movie posits that David’s belief that it should be about the music, about talent and nothing else, is right. But in arriving at that pure notion, David underestimates technology’s ability to connect us, ignoring the very thing that gets him into this mess in the first place. David represents aspiration for Yung Felon. He looks like him, is from the same neighborhood as him, and, importantly, he actually holds the power to change Yung Felon’s life. The wealth gap grows larger in this country, but we are able to form relationships with people we have never met, more easily able to imagine ourselves in their circumstances than ever before. When that falsified sense of connection finally disappears, the desperation that results becomes dangerous.
In “High and Low,” the kidnapper views Gondo’s estate from afar, the house on a hill visible from his cramped, sweltering apartment in the bowels of Yokohama. But in “Highest 2 Lowest,” Yung Felon is constantly bombarded with David’s wealth and success, often up close through the screen he holds in the palm of his hand.