by Nathaniel R
"Deep Moanin' Blues" - Ma's introduction
We see black suffering so often in films that the slightest purposeful subversion of that expectation can stun. You could easily mistake the first shot of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, for instance, for a slave drama. It's a wide shot of a dark quiet forest, crickets chirping, that's punctuated by two men running breathlessly through it, and then the sound of dogs barking as if in pursuit. Two lit torches at the end of the shot, however, don't spell doom but joy. The only escape these men are currently after is communal experience. They're headed for a tent concert where folks are already lined up to pay their coins (a sharp detail) before the camera swoops up to see "Ma" Rainey (Viola Davis) humming those "Deep Moanin' Blues" before a joyful crowd.
Not, mind you, that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom replaces suffering with joy. It just nods to their connection before announcing everything else it has on its mind. Which is quite a lot...
Levee's new shoes
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom isn't a traditional musical but instead a drama about musicians. Yet it still begins in the way great movie musicals do. You can pack a lot of narrative information into a single song cinematically with the right camera decisions, cutaways, and montage. In the first six minutes alone, without any dialogue at all, we get a history lesson of The Great Migration, the tension between Ma Rainey and her new trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman), the thematic minefield of Commerce and Art, and like a light being switched on, or a too bright sunrise, the shift from the South to the North. The light reveals both new economic opportunities and the sobering cost of them.
One of the significant surprises of the play/movie is that the commanding titular character isn't always as present as her 'boys in the band'. It's a delicious curlicue of the play that though we're continually reminded that only Ma Rainey matters -- and Ma Rainey herself loves to underline that -- there's very little proof of it onscreen. Her rival Bessie Smith, name-checked flippantly as if she doesn't care (she does), sells more records and Ma is continually threatening to give up recording altogether (thus walking out of her own story) and return to the South where she's appreciated.
It'd be an empty world without the blues.
Meanwhile there's mutiny within her own band as Levee considers her music "jug band shit" and keeps wanting to rearrange the material to pep it up and give it more appeal to black audiences in northern cities like Chicago and Harlem. Ma's career is threatened and her power is finite and temporary. She deploys it in short bursts to prove that it still exists. Aside from the semi-distractions of a fat suit and dubbed vocals, Viola is triumphant. The great atress risks big-theater for this headlining role and the broad strokes pay off given the material and that so much of Ma's obstinance is, itself, a performance to make others suffer. That said, despite the size of the performance the little details are heavenly. I particularly loved the way Ma bristles and puffs herself up internally when anyone disapproves of her -- the shot of her draping herself on her young lover Dussie Mae and her nephew while black city folks look on in judgment, is a pissy joy, or the way she slides so imperceptibly between self-worth and self-serving rationalizations that it's hard to separate them.
Whenever Viola isn't (appropriately) show-boating, which is much of the time, we're in rehearsal with band leader Cutler (Colman Domingo), piano man Toledo (Glynn Turman), bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts) and trumpeter Levee. They're continually laughing, bickering, philosophizing... and waiting around and waiting on Ma.
Robust emotional, thematic, and character-rich material like Ma Rainey's Black Bottom lives or dies by the acting ensemble and all involved rise to meet the great material. So let's highlight everyone: Taylour Paige is a funny femme joy as Ma's gold-digging plaything Dussie Mae. Jeremy Shamos really sells the flop-sweat of middle-management caught between white power structures and a black diva who knows her worth. Johnny Coyne is at first all cartoon fuse-blowing as the exeuctive Sturdyvant, who can't deal with Ma's stubbornness, but then utterly chilling when cheating Levee, abling illustrating the play's ideas about power hiearchies and exploitation. Dusan Brown does fine work as Ma's stuttering nephew and his momentary triumph and joy in music-making is endearing. Glynn Turman is a perfect foil and unwitting kindling for Levee's youthful naive fire, as his character Toledo pontificates about life and the black experience. Michael Potts ably and quietly supports his fellow bandmates (though Slow Drag is, we'd argue, the only truly underwritten character). Colman Domingo, the ever reliable actor who ought to be a bigger star, is instantly recognizable as a people-pleasing kind of ringleader. You know the type. They get along with everyone, hold the center, and mediate with aplomb. Cutler is a semi-expert at cooling Ma's fires, mostly by letting her speak, and assumes he'll be able to get there with Levee.
It's a fateful mistake.
I got my time comin' to me.
Levee is walking trauma, rare talent, and youthful abandon all in one trash-talking package. Boseman is a marvel from his high-spirited intro, shoes first, to his shockingly vulnerable confession monologue, to his rage against both the white man and God, and on through to his inevitable exhausted defeat. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has the awful privilege of being the last vehicle for Chadwick Boseman's gift. And what a gift. Boseman pours himself so thoroughly into the role that it's hard not to wonder if he knew it would be his swansong. Despite all of Levee's adult self-regard he's still essentially a wounded child - watch the way his eyes dart for approval when he reminds his bandmates that "everybody can't play like I do" while boasting about his musical future. Boseman packs such conflicting complex emotion into every scene and such fire into his blasphemous pronouncements against god that you worry for his soul even if you aren't religious! It's the single best performance of an impressive but tragically short career.
One repeated motif in the play finds Levee continually trying to open a jammed door as a way out of the stifling rehearsal space. In one very wise stage-to-cinema adjustment, he finally opens it only to enter an even smaller enclosed brick space; it's one of those weird entombed atriums that sometime happen between city buildings. The shot is brief and not particularly subtle but it really sells the no-way out conundrum of gifted black artists in a time that wasn't ready for them. Another evocative only-in-cinema moment is a cutaway during Toledo's "leftovers" monologue when we see exquisitely lit shots of isolated black people staring off into space in the city. It's not remotely naturalistic cinema but neither is it straight theater.
Director George C Wolfe is a legend on Broadway, winning Tonys for directing both straight dramas and musicals. As you can imagine both skill sets come in handy here in taking on one of August Wilson's most famous plays. Wolfe and his skilled department heads, particularly legendary costume designer Ann Roth, choose the right visual and sonic information to share but mostly they let August Wilson's lauded play soar and the brilliant actors interpret his text. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. You don't hear the reverse as often though in the hands of masters, it's true. The number of pictures a great playwright like August Wilson can paint with superb actors as brushes and colors is humbling.
Grade: A-
Oscar Chances: Strong across the board but particularly with the actors branch. Will the craft branches respond as enthusiastically?