A Closer Look At How HIGHEST 2 LOWEST Reinvents A Familiar Story
Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low is one of my favorite movies to talk about in terms of the art of adaptation. Kurosawa’s sweaty, desperate epic is a standout example of how you can make a brilliant adaptation of another work without actually following the thing you’re adapting all that closely. Working off of Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom (itself part of McBain’s 87th Precinct series), Kurosawa’s movie alternates between following the book religiously and breaking from it entirely. Now Spike Lee has taken a tilt at the tale with his film Highest 2 Lowest, recently released on Apple Plus. And it should come as no surprise that the legendary provocateur has his own distinct vision for a familiar story.
The set-up is unchanged each time: A wealthy man in the midst of a career-defining, wealth-endangering deal receives a call informing him that his son has been kidnapped. The rich guy is immediately willing to pay any amount to bring his son home safe, but then there’s a complication: The kidnappers screwed up and abducted the son of the rich man’s driver, which means the wealthy man is now on the hook for the ransom of a boy that isn’t even his.
So, what does he do?
That’s where things get interesting.
In the original book, the rich guy refuses to pay the money, and so the second half of the story becomes about the investigating detectives frantically trying to track down the kidnappers before the deadline passes and the young hostage’s life is forfeit. When the culprits are finally found, the rich guy accompanies the police on their raid and personally rescues the abducted boy. But despite this heroic action, the rich man’s wife still leaves him just as she vowed to do if he actually went ahead with the ‘let a child die rather than cough up some money’ approach to the situation.
Women, amiright? You leave one child at the mercy of homicidal criminals…
Kurosawa’s movie follows McBain’s book pretty much beat for beat in its first half, detailing in the same exacting manner the step by step procedure for dealing with this kidnapping. Aside from shifting the setting, it’s about as 1:1 a translation as you can get from moving from one form of media to another.
And. Then.
At almost the exact midway point, High and Low pivots into a totally different animal from King’s Ransom. In the film, the rich guy, played here by Toshiro Mifune, does pay the ransom, securing the boy’s safety and ruining his own finances. The back-half now becomes about the desperate efforts by the police to honor this selfless choice by recovering the money before Mifune’s character defaults on his loans.
High and Low is one of the great thrillers, regardless of its origins and its relationship to any source material. But isn’t it fascinating to take a story centered around a moral choice and then retell it with the protagonist making the exact opposite decision they did in the original? By transforming McBain’s text in this way, Kurosawa opens up a gripping page-turner into something richer and more robust. An expertly orchestrated procedural becomes, in addition, a referendum on American and Japanese cultures and communities, on what we value in masculinity, and on the divisions and intersections between the rich and poor within an urban environment.
And. Then.
Just over sixty years later, Spike Lee and his buddy Denzel Washington got together and took the same ingredients and they went ahead and made…something else.
I’m not going to try and do a point by point list of all the ways the new film is similar to or distinct from the old one. We’d be here all day. Or night. Whatever time frame in which you are receiving these words.
Look, point being, Highest 2 Lowest makes the sort of modernizations and adjustments that one expects from a decades-later, alternate-setting remake and we don’t have to try and catalog them all. For instance, Denzel’s David King is a music industry bigwig rather than an executive at a shoe factory. Minor characters like the non-kidnapped son and the father of the kidnapped boy (played here by a quietly transfixing Jeffrey Wright) have their roles greatly expanded. But in terms of the plot, we’re in very similar terrain to the previous iterations. The dilemma and the socioeconomic crisis fueling it are evergreen. Which sucks, now that I’ve said that, but at least we get some neat movies.
So where does Spike (and credited screenwriter Alan Fox) find something new to do with such well-worn material? How did an American original make this story his own?
The answer lies less in the nitty gritty of how H2L reworks the plot and more in the fundamental reframing of the story. You see, this third version is the first time that the main character is also the actual protagonist.
McBain’s book and Kurosawa’s film are procedurals in the truest sense of the word. You move in lock step with the investigators as they diligently work their way towards the kidnappers, one lead at a time. The rich guy and his choice may be at the center of the story, but he recedes from prominence once that choice is made and the narrative focus shifts to the ripple effects caused by his action or inaction. One of the most striking features of High and Low is how little screentime or dialogue Mifune has in the film’s second hour after being in nearly every frame of the first. He all but vanishes entirely from the film prior to reappearing for the conclusion. The King of King’s Ransom is primarily framed as an obstacle for the true protagonists, the police, to navigate and maneuver around.
But Highest 2 Lowest stars Denzel Washington and Denzel Washington is not a man who recedes. Spike Lee winds up combining both prior versions, retaining Kurosawa’s biggest alteration but keeping McBain’s third act in which the rich man personally takes action and brings down his tormentor. If anything, the procedural elements that defined both earlier incarnations are the part of the story that Lee is least interested in. The police in H2L demonstrate competency and empathy (Occasionally. At times.) but they’re ultimately irrelevant to the machinery of the plot and the outcome of the story.
If McBain wrote a book about a stressful couple days in the life of some cops, and if Kurosawa made a movie about the savagery bred from the divide between the Haves and Have Nots, then Lee has made the only riff on this story that can truly be called a character piece. Everything in H2L is filtered through how it relates to this man, David King, and what this ordeal is doing to, and revealing about, him.
The early sections of the film are deliberately off-putting, with stilted dialogue and staccato editing that defies any sort of rhythm. Washington has been sapped of almost all charisma and charm, and his diatribes against the modern world have a viewer bracing themselves for a movie-length onslaught of Old Man Yells At Cloud energy (not that Spike Lee is in any way wrong to pause his movie to rant for a minute about how much AI sucks). This version of King may still talk a good game about staying connected with real people and the human element of creating art, but everything about how Lee and Washington dramatize the life of this man makes it clear that wealth has put his soul into hibernation.
But the film progresses, we get to see King get shocked out of his haze and actually reengage with a vibrant city and world inaccessible from his penthouse. Earlier he may have said all the right things about prioritizing music over business in the music business, but it’s only in the film’s closing moments that a healed and whole man, surrounded by a healed and whole family, can truly connect with art and human expression in a visceral and emotional way.
Highest 2 Lowest gives you a lot to chew on (it’s a Spike Lee movie, the man doesn’t under-stuff his cinema) but it’s this aspect of it that resonates with me, that feels unique and specific to this version of the story. King’s Ransom ends with a cynical shrug, while the finale of High and Low feels downright apocalyptic. But in Spike Lee’s telling, this is a story of cleansing and healing, of men losing their fear of the future by letting go of the past and embracing the present with all its terrors and all its beauty. It becomes a story about finding your way back to your truest self despite all the noise of the modern world forever threatening to drown out the part of you that’s really you.
Flawed, brilliant, shaggy, ambitious, messy, focused…yeah, no matter how it started, this could only be a Spike Lee joint.
