MOVIE REVIEW : ‘School Daze’ Crammed With Cheeky Satire

Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (opening Friday at selected theaters) apparently began as a simple little script about pledges at an all-black Atlanta college fraternity during homecoming weekend.

But somewhere along the line, after the success of his “She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee began to load--even overload--his story. It flares off in every direction, exploding in Roman-candle bursts of cheeky satire. It’s packed with breezy musical numbers and a brawling gang of characters, streaming through the movie in continuous eruptions of overlapping dialogue and dizzying badinage. Wildly hip-hopping, the movie careens around many different genres without settling firmly into any.

Is it a musical--and, if so, what kind? An “Animal House”-style sex comedy? A political romance? A satire of contemporary black academia? A football farce? A “community” comedy a la Robert Altman? A deceptively fissured ideological discourse on the need for black unity? A raunchy MTV review obsessed with rumps? A happy-time sepia “Good News?”

Well, it’s a little bit of each, and some of all. Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee--and shaking its booty impudently all the while--the movie soars over many categories and crashes against a few others, emerging with guts and brains mostly intact.

Nobody can complain that Lee has been sitting on his laurels, amiably repeating himself. None of that Eddie Murphy stuck-in-the-shtick strategy here. In fact, Lee has taken the one part of “She’s Gotta Have It” that didn’t work well, the fantasy musical routine, and expanded on it. Daring a lot, failing a few times, he’s made a movie that keeps breaking free of its moorings, whirling off center.

It’s uneven. You can be fantastically entertained one moment, as with Tisha Campbell’s flaming show-stoppers, Lee’s hapless dates or Ossie Davis’ stunning impersonation of a football coach’s Baptist-style half-time exhortations, or you can feel over-bombarded, as in the horror movie fraternity rituals.

Never mind. “School Daze” tries too many targets to hit them all. The important thing is that it hits its share, with a view of black college life that’s impudent, juicy and fresh.

In “She’s Gotta Have It,” each of Nola’s three male suitors represented a specific type, almost a “humor.” In “School Daze,” Lee takes that approach further. Instead of representing his “types” with characters, he shows them as groups, split up into energetic little ensembles. There are at least eight communities here, all but one within Mission College (based, vaguely, on Lee’s own alma mater, Atlanta’s Morehouse).

Two warring student body factions are whimsically dubbed the Wannabees and the Jigaboos: light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks, those who “wanna be white” and those who glory in their difference.

The Wannabees cluster around the authoritarian frat house Gamma Phi Gamma, a quasi-Fascist band of “Big Brothers” who shave their pledges bald. (These hopefuls include Lee himself as suffering Half Pint--whose major accomplishments are to betray his cousin and lose his virginity. Likethe movie itself, Half Pint often gets overwhelmed.) The Gammas’ distaff auxiliary are the Gamma Rays--including the magnificent Campbell--some of whom have gone overboard on blond hair dye and blue contact lenses.

The Jigs include a band of largely jocular revolutionaries, led by glowering Dap Dunlap (Larry Fishburne--who has the right simmering charisma for this role); their burning issue is the university’s refusal to cut off some South African investments. In between are the student government--represented by one outmanned peacemaker--and the complacent faculty, more concerned with their inept football team than with divestiture. There is one last group, the outside non-college blacks, who, like many townies, resent everybody inside.

The basic clash is close to “Animal House,” but what Lee sacrifices in hard laughs or toga parties he often makes up for in social complexity and idealism. This is a blithe movie, a bright buzz-bomb of a comedy-musical-romance--but it’s also a heady one. And perhaps the most curious thing about Spike Lee, as actor or film maker, is his cerebral mode of address: deadpan, seemingly unemotional.

In “She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee’s Mars Blackmon delivered a number of incendiary speeches--excoriating everything from the black bourgeoise to Larry Bird--with owlish eyes and an even, uninflected monotone. That comically mechanical voice somehow emptied the tirades of threat.

“She’s Gotta Have It” was slow and droll, like Lee’s delivery. “School Daze,” by contrast, is throbbing and busy. Occasionally there’s a negative side to this, the movie flies all over the map. But it’s such an interesting map--so topographically, socially and satirically rich--that it’s hard to mind. Lee brings together so many talented people--including his longtime cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, his composer-father Bill Lee and actors Davis, Fishburne, Campbell, Joe Seneca, Kyme, Giancarlo Esposito and the rest of the full-to-bursting cast--that the dull moments are fewer than the overripe ones.

And though “School Daze” (MPAA rated R, for nudity and language) isn’t as successful as the more modestly scaled “She’s Gotta Have It,” in the end, it may be even more rewarding and promising. The movie’s seemingly twisted view of higher education suggests a straight eye, a cool mind, a steady heart--and a great aim. The Groves of Academe, from that angle, couldn’t get groovier.