Delayed Reaction: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Premise: A group of black musicians butt heads during a recording session in 1920s Chicago.

 

I don't have much familiarity with August Wilson's work. I've only seen the recent adaptations of Fences and now Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. I've never seen his work on stage. I've come to a few conclusions though. Great performance movies. Transfixing dialogue. And, the stories go a beat further than I need to make their point. I'm also fully aware that they were written as plays while watching the movie. I mean, I didn't actually know Ma Rainey's Black Bottom was based on a play when I started it, but I figured it out pretty quickly just by watching.

 

The stand-out performances of this film are Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. Davis plays the eponymous Ma Rainey: the legendary blue singer. She's a force in this movie. Davis is nearly unrecognizable after putting on weight and with makeup that makes her look like she's always sweating out the drinks she had the night before. Davis won her first Oscar for the other August Wilson adaptation I've seen (Fences) and I wouldn't be surprised to see her do it again with this. Boseman plays the cocky trumpet player in Ma's band who dreams of being a star himself. His overconfidence is an overcompensation for the horrors he's seen in his life. It really is a great performance. Boseman's shocking death this summer will probably push this over the edge in the Oscar conversation, which I wouldn't be mad about, although people are getting a little performative in their praise of the performance. He's reeeeally good, but let's hold off on terms like "iconic", "towering", or "all-time" for now. Those terms mean more with some aging. It's almost a shame that Davis and Boseman are so good though, because Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, and Michael Potts are great in less flashy roles. This really is a fun movie for watching performances bounce off one another.

 

Much like Fences, this is a performers' movie at the expense of some other elements. It feels stagy, especially in the way that scenes turn into monologues. The only way it could be less subtle when it happens is if they'd turned off all the lights and place a spotlight on the person talking. The story gets a little extreme. The final act of Boseman's character works better for a stage production than a modern film. Although, I do love the final gut punch at the end when the new band is playing one of Boseman's songs. Perhaps I should credit George C. Wolfe's direction for mostly staying out of the way. The downside of adapting plays with such strong authorial voices is that it's really hard to translate them to the screen. It's hard to deliver the same line in a way that works for the last row in a theater and for a close up with a camera. In other words: Great cast. Great performances. Great topics discussed. Great music and set design. Not enough ability to calibrate it for the screen.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend