Balanced spoke movie

4 LITTLE GIRLS: Documentary. Directed by Spike
Lee. (Not rated. 102 minutes. At the Opera Plaza, Piedmont in Oakland and
California in Berkeley).

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It happened in 1963, the same year as Medger Evers’ assassination and the summer that Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech at the
Lincoln Memorial. But in terms of bringing home the horrors of racism,
neither of those events compares to the September 15 bombing of a
Birmingham, Ala., church, and the four black girls who died in the blast.

“This was the awakening,” says Walter Cronkite in “4 Little Girls,” a
feature-length documentary by Spike Lee that opens today at Bay Area
theaters. The culmination of a wish that Lee first got as a film-school
undergraduate, “4 Little Girls” brilliantly captures a moment in American
history and tells an achingly painful story of injustice and family loss.

True to form, Lee, whose films include “Malcolm X” and “Do the Right
Thing,” doesn’t pull any punches. The archival footage and photographs he
culls are vivid, upsetting: For a brief moment we see the
shattered corpses of the four victims — Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise
McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson, middle-class girls
dressed in white for Youth Day services at the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham.

Lee also gathers interviews with survivors and lawmakers; with community
leaders such as Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young; with
celebrities Bill Cosby and Ossie Davis; and especially with the friends and
family of the four girls. Photographed by Ellen Kuras, the witnesses are
captured in stark close-up, cut off at the forehead and chin.

Inevitably, their stories are heartbreaking and raw. Addie Mae’s sister
Junie says she had panic attacks for years after the blast. Denise’s mother,
Maxine, remembers coming to identify her daughter’s body at a
church room that was used as a morgue, going to mourn at her mother’s house
(“I couldn’t stop hollerin’ and I couldn’t stop screaming”) and brushing
her daughter’s hair over the brick embedded in her skull.
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Lee’s hand grows heavy only when he features a deaf, disabled George
Wallace and allows the former Alabama governor to make a fool of himself,
denying his racism and bringing his embarrassed black nurse into the camera
frame to prove his point.

Aside from that bit of excess, Lee lets the events and those who remember
them tell the story. He establishes a context for the bombing — Birmingham,
according to the Rev. King, was “the most thoroughly segregated city in the
United States” — and portrays Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the white
racist who was tried and convicted of the church bombing.

Coming on the heels of Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning “When We Were Kings,”
“4 Little Girls” is in some way the perfect complement: a reminder of the
thick vein of racism that still runs through America, and the importance of
never forgetting.