“Crooklyn” (1994) is a Spike Lee film about a nine-year-old girl growing up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 1973. Imagine if Spike Lee had done “My Girl” (1991). Sort of like that. Except that it is one of the few well-known American films where the main character is a black girl. Spike Lee’s sister Joie wrote and produced. It is loosely based on her life. Alfre Woodard plays the mother.
My Rule of Alfre: No matter how bad it looks at first, if Alfre Woodard is in it, it will be well worth watching to the end.
Back in the 1990s I did not fully understand that, so I stopped watching “Crooklyn” after 20 minutes. I thought it was terrible.
Watching it now I can see why: it has no plot and, for the first 40 minutes, no main character. Because it is a Spike Lee film, I thought the oldest son, the one with the glasses, was the main character, but it turns out to be his little sister Troy, rhymes with Joie. She has four brothers but none of them stands out as a character in his own right – they are just her stupid brothers. Instead her father (Delroy Lindo) and mother stand out.
What we learn:
- Brooklyn is the centre of the universe.
- The early 1970s had great music.
- Family is important: never take it for granted.
- Alfre Woodard is great.
Nothing about race in this Spike Lee joint: Troy pretty much lives in a protected, all-black world.
Like “My Girl”, also set in the early 1970s, it does not seem particularly dated. While it hits you over the head with the music and games and television of the period, like it was a VH1 flashback show, everything is too staged and nice-looking. Gone are the terrible songs and terrible clothes. The utter tackiness of that period never comes through – helped in part by her mother’s distaste of polyester and her father’s distaste of rock-and-roll.
Still, it makes wonderful use of period music. Especially “Never Can Say Goodbye” (1971) by the Jackson 5 and “Oh Girl” (1972) by the Chi-Lites.
At one point Troy stays with her aunt down South for a few weeks. Her aunt’s house is filmed through an anamorphic lens: everything seems too narrow, like it was an alternate reality. Her aunt had the whole middle-class fake thing down perfectly. When Troy gets a letter from her mother it is a breath of fresh air. Troy could not wait to get back to Brooklyn and neither could I!
Scene from “Claudine” (1974)
“Crooklyn” compared to “Claudine” (1974), starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, another family film set in black New York in the early 1970s:
- Bed-Stuy not Harlem
- middle-class not working-class
- general R&B hits instead of Gladys Knight & the Pips
- the main character is a girl not a woman
- the characters are way less stereotyped
- written by a black woman remembering her girlhood, not by well-meaning white liberals trying to “show the other side”
Troy in the closing scene of “Crooklyn”
See also:
- Claudine
- Other Alfre Woodard films:
- The BET Fallacy
- My Girl Syndrome - how the past gets filtered
She has four brothers but none of them stands out as a character in his own right – they are just her stupid brothers.
I’d say the conflict between the father character and the eldest son is a stand out in the movie. The son seeks to establish his own identity somewhat awkwardly and with a fair degree of pain and disappointment for the father. The mother comes in discreet yet strong making it clear to the elder son to show support to the father, but the kid just has some other ideas tugging at him.
This is one of my all-time favorite Spike Lee joints because I, too, lived in a protected all-black world as a child and loved every minute, second, and hour of it! There were few worries that stemmed from the community at large. The movie closely parallels my childhood with the exception that both my parents worked and my mother is still alive.
i wanna watch it! you know some black movies pleasantly surprise me…like lackawanna blues GREAT movie…why don’t movies like that get mainstream appreciation, but movies like precious do…??
another great movie that is underrated ruby bridges by disney…
oh and THE INKWELL, that is a good movie too!!
@ peanut
We all know why movies like precious gets more press than positive black movies like this.Hollywood sells sterotypes and drama,precious has both[brute sapphire,and mammy sterotypes] while movies like these have neither.They want to keep movies like precious around to show blacks as not human and are violent and abusive.I didn’t watch precious but people said it was like the color purple just worse.one minute they show a movie like precious where the father rapes and impregnates his daughter then they show movies that have the father being absent a deadbeat.Its most of hollywoods job to destroy the way people look at the black community. The message is a black father who is in his childs life is abusing them or he is not there.Whites can live their whole lives and not be around blacks and watch movies about blacks and think that’s how we act because they don’t have real blacks around to show those sterotypes aren’t true.Blacks grow up and be around whites all the time so when i see shows like jersey shore i know not all whites act like that.
Crooklyn is one of my favorite Spike Lee movies. It was sweet and poignant. I loved the dynamic of the family. It always broke my heart when Alfre Woodard’s character dies. The kids was always too cute. It is also a sweet bit of nostalgia. The Soul Train line dance. The natural hairstyles it was just a sweet homage to the 70′s. Didn’t see Claudine.
Precious was hard and ugly to watch. I remember sitting in the theater. White people were uncomfortable and there was nervous laughter coming from them. They were laughing in all the wrong parts of different scenes in the film that were uncomfortable. I don’t care for Lee Daniel’s work. I hated Monster’s Ball as well.
@Peanut ; Lackawanna Blues was an excellent film.
The little girl in Crooklin just stole my heart. I always liked the Alfre Woodard’s character always referred to her as “Ladybug”. Such a special bond between a mother and daughter.
^Yeah, the relationship between Troy and the mother was nicely, warmly characterized.
@Mary
not to derail, but why even go see Precious? I stayed faaaaar away from the movie theaters when that flick was playing.
@ Mary,
great points…precious was disgusting to me…i don’t know any black people who act live like precious and no “We are NOT all Precious.” This is NOT to discount those who are victims of sexual and physical abuse at all…but there’s a way that you go about doing those type of films without degrading entire races of people and white people have incest and stuff in their families too…but we never see that pumped as THE ONLY experience associated with being white.
i can understand how white people were laughing at all the wrong times…whenever i’m in a theater seeing a black movie and there are white people there…they either never get the jokes or laugh at the wrong things
most white people though not all, are just awkward when it comes to black movies
@Legion; I wanted to give it a chance to see what it was about. Big Mistake. I thought that was just a disgusting film. And I love movies. But Lee Daniel I am not a fan of director Lee Daniel’s work.
Abagond, you should do a review of Black Belt Jones / Jim Kelly.
Of course the inherent coolness of the 70s pics might be enough. Lol!.
http://pop-sesivo.tumblr.com/image/15800861628
Another fan of Crooklyn, this movie is one of my top favs that I can watch at any point and sit to the very end. Such a lovely coming of age story. Favorite scene is when the Aunt is looking for *Queenie*, hilarious! I just recently watched this on HBO.
@ Peanut
Because white feelings about blacks are limited. They can fear them, laugh at them and sometimes pity them, but putting themselves in their shoes and feeling empathy is hard for them to do. Their lack of outrage at, say, Katrina or police brutality shows that. Empathy requires a sense of equality (“that could be me”), while pity, fear and laughing at someone do not.
Joie rhymes with Troy? I thought Ms. Lee pronounced her name ‘Zhwah’ not ‘Joy’?
Sometimes it’s hard to know if I like films with all Black characters, who are not stereotypes, just because there are Black people on the screen who aren’t stereotypes or if I really like the content of the film. Crooklyn falls into that category for me.
I love this movie, this is honestly one of Spike’s better movies.