Hey, I'm Robert Daniels @812filmreviews, and I’ll be explaining how Spike Lee's DA 5 BLOODS continues the director's career interest in icy father-son relationships as seen between Paul (Delroy Lindo) and David (Jonathan Majors). Thread! 
In DA 5 BLOODS, four war buddies Otis (Clarke Peters); Eddie (Norm Lewis); Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.); and Paul return to present-day Vietnam to recover the body of their fallen brother Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and a cache of buried gold bars.
On their journey, Da Bloods are joined by Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors). The pair share a contentious relationship that mirrors others in Lee’s oeuvre: MO’ BETTER BLUES, GET ON THE BUS, HE GOT GAME, and BAMBOOZLED.
Considering I lost my father at twenty-five, I’ve always seen Lee’s draw to abbreviated father-son relationships as more than gripping. Though few of the characters match my father, I identify with the emotional repression, and the dashed hopes for more time that fuels them.
In Lee’s Jazz film MO’ BETTER BLUES, Bleek (Denzel Washington) is a trumpeter whose father allowed his mother’s stern practice schedule to dominate his childhood. Though close to his father, Bleek avoids repeating his dad’s mistakes. He gives his son time to be a kid.
The loss of time and its wearing down of a father-son relationship is pitched to the extreme in DA 5 BLOODS. Nowhere is that push-pull more painfully displayed than when Paul lashes out at his son David for tagging along on his expedition.
In Lee’s early career he shared a close working relationship with his father, composer Bill Lee. In fact, Lee wrote the scores for his son’s first three films. MO’ BETTER BLUES would prove to be their final collaboration.
Both MO’ BETTER BLUES and DA 5 BLOODS also have Lee’s classic double dolly shot—when an actor stands on a dolly that’s pulled forward to create a levitating effect. In the former, it’s after Lee’s character Giant is assaulted. In the latter, it involves a paternal relationship.
Much like DA 5 BLOODS, his 1996 film GET ON THE BUS features another group of men on a journey, this one a bus ride to Washington DC’s Million Man March. Here, father and son—Evan & Evan Jr.—are passengers chained together as part of the latter’s 72-hour parole.
While Paul is often harsh toward David, like Evan Sr., he often displays brief spurts of misguided warmth. Both Paul and Evan Sr. believe that through discipline, and repressing their emotional truths, they might steer their sons toward their will.
The closest equivalent to Paul’s anger in Lee’s father-son thematic journey is Jake Shuttlesworth (Washington) in his 1998 ode to basketball, HE GOT GAME.
Shuttlesworth—what I think is one of Washington’s underrated performances—is a temperamental father paroled from a 15-year jail sentence with the expressed mission of getting his high school basketball player son to commit to the governor’s favorite college for a reduced sentence
Like Paul, Jake mercilessly tortures his son Jesus (Ray Allen), submitting him to grueling practices. He bullies his son, pushing him to the point of feeling unloved. Moreover, both relationships are soured due to a mother’s death.
But more than angry, Paul is wracked by PTSD. Like Junebug (Paul Mooney) the father to Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) in Lee’s groundbreaking Blackface satire BAMBOOZLED, David sees his father as a broken man. As expressed in David’s talk with Otis:
Both films also display Lee’s love for the historical montage. In DA 5 BLOODS it’s the gruesome barrage of Vietnam atrocities and Civil Rights leaders that pepper Paul’s troubled mind. In BAMBOOZLED, it’s the heartbreaking history of Blackface in television and film.
Because history always impedes upon Black father-son dynamics: in ways big and small. Whether it is the recent personal past of Shuttlesworth and Bleek and their hopes to be better fathers, or the long historical traumas of Junebug and Paul, which have made them broken men.
The tragedy of David and Paul is the unavailable time to repair their relationship, though they clearly love each other. Like Junebug and “Jake” Shuttlesworth, Paul pictures himself as a rebellious survivor, allowing Lindo to deliver the most searing monologue of his career.
DA 5 BLOODS, starring Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Jonathan Majors, is now on Netflix.
