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HOMEMOVIESMA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Review
Ma Rainey
Chicago, 1927. While singer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) squares off with white management over her music at a recording session, ambitious trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman) has an eye on Ma’s girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) and his heart set on launching his own career.
By Amon Warmann | Posted 20 Nov 2020
Release Date:
18 Dec 2020
In the early 1980s, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning African playwright August Wilson began writing a collection of ten plays known as the ‘Century Cycle’, with each work telling a story about the Black American experience in a different decade. Fences was the first of these plays to get given the theatrical treatment in 2016, courtesy of director and star Denzel Washington, to whom Wilson’s plays have been entrusted. In many ways Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’s strengths are similar to Fences, with the strong material and emotionally raw performances winning the day even when the transition from play to film isn’t so seamless.
It takes Ma (Viola Davis) almost 20 minutes of screen time to arrive at the recording session where much of Black Bottom takes place. Before then we meet her band — which includes Toledo (Glynn Turman), Slow Drag (Michael Potts), and religious band-leader Cutler (Colman Domingo) — before the camera eventually finds Levee (Chadwick Boseman), fresh from the purchase of some ostentatious yellow shoes. The banter between these four men early on immediately establishes a winsome dynamic between three wise old heads and their younger and cockier upstart. It allows them to go from cracking jokes on each other’s fashion sense to heavily philosophical discussions on a dime, and they do.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
It’s in those discussions where the timelessness of Wilson’s writing, adapted for the screen by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, really shines through. Navigating an entertainment system that’s rigged against people of colour, ownership over one’s art, and knowing your worth are all things that Black artists still grapple with today.
Washington called the shots on Fences, but for Black Bottom he sought out George C. Wolfe. On paper, it makes sense: in addition to being a mega Wilson fan, Wolfe has had award-winning success directing plays on Broadway. The results here, however, are a bit of a mixed bag. He does a good job of drawing you into the film’s sweat-slicked world (the play takes place in the winter, the film takes place in the summer), and a fun mini-montage mid-movie is one of the few ways the language of film augments the storytelling. But too often Black Bottom feels overly play-like, never more so than when Turman’s Toledo delivers his ‘African Stew’ speech about white exploitation. Taken in and of itself it’s powerful, but its placement in the movie is inelegant and it ends up feeling a touch heavy-handed.