Review of the film ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’: on Netflix

About 26 minutes in Black Bottom by Ma Rainey – the 1927 Chicago set adaptation of August Wilson’s play – comes a moment that perfectly sums up the film’s failures. The power and sustain of the blues singing Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) beckons to Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), “Come here and let me see that dress.” The camera is in close-up while Ma Rainey holds Dussie Mae from behind. She sings in the young woman’s ear, delighting her with the conversation about how to find her finest dresses to wear. Ma Rainey’s jeweled hands slide over Dussie Mae’s body. However, the camera’s decision to remain so closed amounts to an almost asexual moment, undermining any real exploration of Ma Rainey’s strangeness. The camera itself seems reluctant to detail sensuality, but the film’s problems are broader than that. Other flaws are on display in addition to routine film production: namely, a script that suggests potentially intriguing ideas, but never explores them. Ma Rainey attitudes towards being an actor’s showcase, but his narrative – and his actor traps – forbid that to be the reality.

Most of Ma RaineyThe action of a house in a greenhouse dynamic. The sassy and selfish blues star is in Chicago to record a record of some of her tried and true songs. While longtime collaborator Cutler (Colman Domingo doing his best to bring the story to life) is infinitely loyal to Ma Rainey’s whims, new trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman) sees this encounter as a stepping stone to a bigger career with his own band , recording the song he writes that feels best reflects the pulse of time. Ma Rainey, unsurprisingly, sees Levee as ungrateful and inexperienced. Conflict of egos. Sex and violence follow. However, with all these characters and combustible incidents, Ma Rainey it is a lifeless enterprise that is never able to ignore its previous identity as a play to take advantage of the cinematographic form.

I don’t want to obscure the rot that is at the center of this film. August Wilson may be a beloved playwright, as evidenced by Hollywood’s willingness to adapt his work, but Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s version of Ma Rainey does nothing to show us why it happens. The script addresses issues that have the potential to be powerful – black intra-racial relationships, tension between blacks in the north and south, the ways in which black artists must navigate the power structures of whites who seek to bare their work. But these questions are only touched upon, and the dialogue around them is affected, even laughable. Consider, for example, the moment when Levee, when seducing Dussie Mae, asks, “Can I introduce my red cock to his brown hen?” A sentence that deserves a roll of the eye is received as if it were the height of seduction. Ma Rainey it has the weight of the powerful Hollywood actors behind it, but it seems incapable or disinterested in enjoying the delights of what the film can do.

There is a beauty in Ann Roth’s cinematographic costumes and her touching period details; but it just covers up the fact that the aesthetics of the film as a whole is, at times, absolutely ugly. I can’t get over the pale nature of the color palette. Director George C. Wolfe – who was clearly transported from the world of theater, and I don’t mean that as a compliment – and director of photography Tobias A. Schliessler created a strangely breathless visual grammar for his film. The problems are apparent in the first minutes, full of strange decisions: lazy transitions, images reproduced as newspaper clippings, inelegant editing work. When Ma Rainey shows up at his recording studio upstairs, the camera work is a little more fluid, a strong contrast to the static approach that takes you down while the band is rehearsing in a dilapidated room. Filmmakers rely too much on close-ups like the Dussie Mae sequel, forgetting the stories our bodies are likely to tell. In many ways, the camera acts as a spotlight on the stage, making stark choices to signal that it is it is a time to pay attention. But this has the effect of undermining performance; the work of the camera needs to be more elegant to avoid the feeling of a recorded piece.

As for Ma Rainey herself, I am usually attracted to characters like her: messy women, larger than life, who proudly proclaim in body and words their own worth, regardless of how the world seeks to make them feel. otherwise. But instead of feeling like a powerful emblem of black artistic tradition, and a complicated woman, Ma Rainey pisses off. She is selfish and selfish. Sometimes, she is totally cruel. These traits are not as investigated as applied without any care for the humanity that feeds them. His queer identity is questioned so fleetingly that it appears to be a questionably methodical choice of points of representation. I’m not sure if any actor could save this story. Of course, Viola Davis proved to be a constantly capable performer, mainly because of the intensity with which she impregnates her characters. But here she is totally annoying, all arrogance and boast in a fat suit that adds an uncomfortable tendency to the performance. Is this how filmmakers see fat black women? Why make your generosity – in terms of personality – so strangely grotesque? Why not give her juicy monologues, the kind that Chadwick Boseman receives? Unfortunately, Davis plays Ma Rainey as a caricature; it can never suggest interiority. She shifts her weight from side to side. She looks slyly and licks her gold teeth. It is fraught with decisions that obscure rather than emphasize anything about the woman behind the legend.

Chadwick Boseman, in his final film role, does better. Partly because the story is undoubtedly more interested in who his character is than in what he represents. Many of the important twists in the film depend on Boseman’s presence in the center. He plays Levee with a bravado that mirrors that of Ma Rainey, but that confidence belies a horrible and sad story. In the first of his tearful monologues, Boseman is called to embody his character’s anger that comes from watching his mother’s rape by a group of white men in his own home when he was 8 years old. Boseman gives his all to the scene. He’s anxious with a lot of energy. Your eyes are wild. But again, the camera work makes the monologue strangely claustrophobic, impairing its potential emotional depth.

Ma Rainey it demonstrates with ease the strange place that black cinema occupies in Hollywood now. Yes, there are more opportunities and visibility for filmmakers and black actors on the Hollywood stage. But many of the works made available – such as horror films and series, including Bad hair, Lovecraft Country, and Antebellum – feel that they take advantage of the audience’s desire to see themselves on the screen without offering the power or subtlety necessary to make these stories work.

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