HIGHEST 2 LOWEST
Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee revisits Kurosawa
This is the sixth film in the Selection for Spike Lee. In this reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller High and Low (1963), the activist artist is reunited with his favorite actor, Denzel Washington, almost twenty years after Inside Man. Highest 2 Lowest is being presented Out of Competition.
Kurosawa’s psychological thriller explores social inequality by telling the story of a wealthy industrialist whose son has been kidnapped—or so he believes. Denzel Washington plays the role of the wealthy patriarch, with the difference that here, the man is a music producer with a faltering career. Building on their past collaborations, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington are back together some years after their last film, now closer than ever.
In Mo’ Better Blues (1990), the actor played the role of a jazz musician, in Malcolm X (1992), he carried the movie from start to finish, and in He Got Game (1998), he gave a brilliant performance as a jaded former professional basketball player. Alongside him in Highest 2 Lowest is the actor Jeffrey Wright and the famous rapper A$AP Rocky — under his own name, Rakim Mayers — who has already made a name for himself as an actor in Zoolander 2 (2016) and Monster (2018).
Highest 2 Lowest, the crime thriller shot in New York between the upscale neighborhoods along the East River and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, marks Spike Lee’s sixth film in the Selection, following Do the Right Thing, filmed in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn (1989), the activist film Jungle Fever (1991), the dynamic Girl 6 as a Special Screening (1996), the compilation film project Ten Minutes Older shown in Un Certain Regard (2002), and BlacKkKlansman, a sharply militant film in 2018…
