A review of the new movie “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
This is a superb Netflix movie that I was fortunate enough to see at the cinema – such a visit being a rare occurrence in the year of the coronavirus.
It tells the story of a recording session in Chicago in 1927 of the legendary African-American Gertrude “Ma’ Rainey who sang from 1899–1933 and was known as the “mother of the blues”. There was a dance at the time called the black bottom and hence the title of the film is the name of one of her songs.
Viola Davis put on 20lb and donned heavy make-up to play Rainey in a blistering career-best performance. Her backing group of four includes the trumpeter Levee which was the final cinematic role of Chadwick Boseman before his premature death. The role is a million miles from his casting as “Black Panther” and his virtuoso performance makes his loss all the more poignant. The film is dedicated to him.
In this narrative, Rainey is an uncompromising artist who knows exactly what she wants and always gets it, knowing just how far to weld her power over both the white recording engineers and her own black entourage. By contrast, Levee is the young, fiercely ambitious performer and songwriter who wants to form his own band, but overreaches with ultimately terrible consequences. There are some powerful set-pieces about race, power and God.
The film was originally a 1982 play by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American playwright August Wilson, one of ten entrusted to Denzil Washinton to bring to the screen. The first to be shot was “Fences” for which Washington was both director and star (and which featured Davis). Here he is simply a producer, handing direction to George C Wolfe, an award-winning theatre director.
Like most plays turned into films, the dialogue is terrific, if sometimes grandstanding, but the location is static, although there are a couple of efforts to open out the stage. In this particular case, the wonderful music is almost a character in itself, representing both an explanation and an expression of the black condition.