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Way before the midway point in this movie about white collar crime and lesbians, one begins to wonder about the goings-on in Spike Lee's brain. It's as if he really wanted to do a social satire condemning huge swaths of American culture but couldn't artfully complete the job, so he distracted himself by creating witty scenes about lesbians having sex with a guy. Worse things have happened on film, surely. But few recently have left me as simultaneously amused and befuddled as She Hate Me.
The story appears to be a collision of two morality tales: Jack, a man employed by a corrupt pharmaceutical company, becomes the fall guy for a white-collar crime debacle after blowing the whistle. Suddenly broke, he reluctantly turns his apartment into a stud farm for a host of affluent lesbians who want babies, and who visit in groups to have sex with him for $10,000 each.
We gather that Jack (Anthony Mackie) is upset about the corruption in his company and is conflicted about his decision to sire babies for cash. If you stretch, you can see the construction of an overarching moral question in the making: Is everything business and is everything business amoral? But from there, we are jettisoned into a grab-bag of a show, where this theme is explored through maudlin dad-has-diabetes family scenes and aggravating statistics on black men in prison, somber moralizing about martyrdom and cartoon depictions of sperm, over-the-top depictions of an Italian-American mob family and simplistic jabs at the pharmaceutical industry, and the telling and retelling of a story about the night watchman at the Watergate Hotel. And always, back to sex with lesbians.
Yes, Jack spends a good bit of time washing down Viagra with Red Bull and impregnating 19 happy mothers-to-be. But he's surprisingly pensive about it. The comedy in these insemination scenes is actually the most successfully delivered of the film—the diverse characters among the lesbians make for a quirky series of bedroom experiences. Sure, there may be some unrealistic representations of how this sort of thing might occur, but then did I mention the cartoon sperm?
You want to read into She Hate Me something about the brilliant social commentary of Spike Lee; you want to say there's some genius in knitting together Enron-inspired villainy with sexual politics, casting a giant moral shadow over everything.
But you find yourself wondering whether he just had a few incomplete ideas and chucked them in a pot with a bunch of headlines, and a sudden interest in lesbians, and called it a movie.