George C Wolfe (2020)
Five years have passed since Denzel Washington announced the forthcoming screen adaptation of all ten plays in August Wilson’s ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’, four years since the first adaptation, Fences, came to fruition. The idea was that one film-of-the-play would be released each year on HBO. The project has since moved to Netflix though Washington has retained his overall executive producer role for the series. It’s been a long interval between Fences and the next adaptation – of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, now streaming on Netflix after a short theatrical release (very short in London, thanks to the latest COVID closure of cinemas). The good news is that George C Wolfe’s film was worth waiting for. I managed to see Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at BFI shortly before the place went dark again and watched it a second time, eight days later, on Netflix.
The time is 1927, the place a Chicago recording studio, where Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey (Viola Davis), ‘Mother of the Blues’, is about to record songs for a new album. Ma has a reputation for being difficult. Her failure to arrive punctually for the session increases the jitters of her manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), and Mel Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), who owns the studio. The delay also allows time for tempers to fray in Ma’s four-man band. The senior members – trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), double bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), and, especially, white-haired Toledo (Glynn Turman), the band’s pianist – are repeatedly, intentionally provoked by Levee (Chadwick Boseman), an ambitious, cocksure young trumpeter. Determined to succeed in the music industry, Levee writes his own compositions, which Sturdyvant has asked to see. To settle an argument, Cutler asks Irvin which version of a song is to be used for the session ahead – the band’s usual arrangement or Levee’s variation on it. Irvin’s answer isn’t the one that Cutler, Slow Drag and Toledo were banking on.
Ma Rainey gets off to a slightly awkward start, though the very first sequence is effective. In Bainesville, Georgia, two Black teenage boys run through a dark wood; on the soundtrack, dogs bark. You naturally fear that the boys are fleeing racist pursuers who mean them harm. Instead, beyond the edge of the wood, are crowds, lights and a banner advertising a Ma Rainey show. The boys aren’t running away; they’re running towards a good time for the local Black community. After a bit of Ma’s singing, the screen cuts to contemporary newspaper front pages that encourage Black Southerners to head North for better (menial) jobs, then to another Ma Rainey show, in Chicago, enjoyed by a similarly enthusiastic African-American audience. As scene-setting, this works well enough but it entails George C Wolf playing his Ma card too early. Her late arrival at the recording session is surely designed to build expectation of her singing. Wolfe reveals the performer and the voice before the film is barely underway.
Wolfe has directed cinema features (and television) before but remains much better known for theatre, most notably as director of the original Broadway production of (both parts of) Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Ma Rainey’s uncertain opening may reflect Wolfe’s lack of film-making imagination but perhaps the same quality, combined with a theatre director’s appreciation of Wilson’s play as a play, strengthens what follows. The action does occasionally move out of the recording studio. We see Ma’s departure from her hotel, accompanied by Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), her young girlfriend, and Sylvester (Dusan Brown), her nephew; a kerfuffle with a white policeman (Joshua Harto), following an incident with Ma’s car as it approaches the studio; the sea of white faces that confronts two of the band when they go to a nearby bar in search of the Coca Cola that Ma demands. Wolfe doesn’t do much, however, to disguise Ma Rainey‘s theatrical nature and the sequences mentioned don’t feel like attempts to open out the material for the sake of doing so. Nor do they detract from the emotional momentum developing inside the studio. After a while, the tensions there are so strong that the short external interludes are a chance to draw breath.
Wolfe’s use of the recording area and other small rooms within the studio is much more confident and consistent than Denzel Washington’s use of the Maxson family house and backyard in Fences. In any case, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom looks to be – assuming that Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s screenplay is faithful to Wilson’s original script – a better play. It has a slender plot but an expansive back story. In a series of monologues, Ma and her band members give voice to recollections of key moments in their personal history, and to their conflicting outlooks on the world and their place in it. Even if parts of these testimonies are embroidered or invented, they’re both passionately individual and illustrative of Black American history more generally in the early years of the twentieth century. And of course it doesn’t matter that (as I understand it) Ma Rainey is the only one of these five characters based on a real person.
The principals are representative, too, of different stages in the evolution of blues music. Levee insists that his more improvisational approach is the future; he derides his fellow instrumentalists and, by extension, Ma Rainey herself as ‘jug band’ merchants. (His seduction of Dussie Mae in another room of the studio is a complementary aspect of his resolve to usurp Ma’s authority.) Sturdyvant’s eventual rejection of his pieces is the rebuff that triggers Levee’s appalling act at the end of the film. In its closing sequence, a white band is recording in the studio. The vocalist’s rendition (of a number called ‘Skip, Skat, Doodle-Do’) is, compared with Ma Rainey’s singing, impersonal and uninteresting but it’s fine by Sturdyvant, now noticeably more relaxed than hitherto. This finale is far from pat, though. Levee, screwed by Sturdyvant, destroys his own future but isn’t wrong about the jazz future.
At one point, Levee draws a knife on the three other musicians but hasn’t used it by the time Wolfe cuts to a resumption of the recording session that includes the full quartet. The bad feelings between the men haven’t been resolved but the threat of violence seems to have been averted. It re-emerges and is shockingly realised after Sturdyvant tells Levee his compositions aren’t what the record-buying public wants. Like Ma, Levee, at the start, arrives at the studio in his own time. Before doing so, he sees a flash pair of shoes in a shop window and buys them. At the other end of the film, Toledo inadvertently treads on Levee’s foot. Toledo can’t do more than scuff one of the new shoes but Levee reacts as if they’re ruined. And so they are: the shoes are an expression of Levee’s self-regarding difference from the rest of the band and, as such, akin to his now rejected songs. (As an emblem of prestige, the shoes also echo Ma, who comes to the studio draped in a fur boa – then complains of the heat.) Levee won’t let the matter drop; Toledo’s mild apologies and telling him to calm down make matters worse; the younger man draws his knife again and stabs the older man, who dies in his arms. On one level, Levee’s action hardly makes sense; on another, the climactic blood-letting in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a necessary catharsis. It’s a real coup de théâtre, superbly played by Chadwick Boseman and Glynn Turman.
With Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprising their Tony-winning roles from the 2010 Broadway revival of the play, the screen version of Fences often came across as an attempt to preserve on film a celebrated stage production. This isn’t the case with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, first staged on Broadway in 1984 and last revived there in 2003. Instead, the film has turned out to be a different, sadder commemoration, of Chadwick Boseman, who died in August this year, during post-production. The film is dedicated to Boseman, ‘in celebration of his artistry and heart’. Watching him, perhaps especially as he delivers Levee’s expletive-ridden denunciation of divine injustice, it’s hard to put out of your mind that he’s no more and Boseman’s dynamism makes it even harder. So do the often static backgrounds, which throw that dynamism into sharper relief.
There’s a minor disadvantage to this: Wolfe’s direction has the effect of showcasing the actors in a way that keeps you very aware that these are performances. That’s particularly the case in Viola Davis’s first scenes, where Wolfe seems too keen to stress Ma Rainey’s larger-than-life presence and does so simply by keeping the camera on her, without much else going on. The problem vanishes once Davis gets the chance to interact with others, and to develop her physical portrait of Ma. With her low-slung bosom and prominent belly (Davis either put on plenty of weight for the film or has been expertly padded), and gold teeth colour-coordinated with her shiny gown, she cuts an extraordinary figure. Her deliberate walk is essential to her personality. Ma knows how musically special she is but has no illusions about the music industry’s strictly circumscribed interest in her. (Foreseeing the end of that interest, she likens it to a john rolling dispassionately away from the hooker who has served her purpose.) Ma therefore knows, too, how much she needs to keep asserting her specialness.
The self-assertion doesn’t always require shouting. Davis often conveys Ma’s aggressive authority more imaginatively – and powerfully – than by raising her speaking voice. It’s when she sings (and she does her own singing) that she lets rip. Her delivery of the song that gives the piece its title, and whose funny, risqué lyrics give a sense of the subversive nature of the blues as they started to impact on white audiences, is tremendous. Among the supporting cast, Glynn Turman is outstanding as Toledo, an underdog bristling with dapper rectitude; Colman Domingo and Michael Potts are both effective as the less forthright members of the band. I wasn’t so keen on Taylour Paige albeit that she has little to do but strike coquettish poses. Paige is, in effect, a feed for the leads to show their character’s feelings about Dussie Mae, which Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman both do wonderfully. Jeremy Shamos and Jonny Coyne are adequate as Irvin and Sturdyvant but their playing is busily stagy beside that of the Black actors.
If the visual mobility of the film (shot by Tobias A Schliessler) is limited, the emotional mobility of the main performances and the plot is anything but. In one of her monologues, Ma Rainey describes what blues music means to her. As she finishes ‘Black Bottom’, Viola Davis expresses Ma’s delight at laying down a track the way she wanted. It’s a highly effective touch that her euphoria is short-lived. Ma has insisted that Sylvester, despite his serious speech impediment, deliver the album intro (‘I promised his mama’). Several takes are needed before he manages to subdue his stammer to utter a couple of sentences. No sooner has Ma completed the song, her face breaking into an excited, uncharacteristic grin, than Sturdyvant informs her the recording has failed because of Sylvester’s microphone.
At its close, George C Wolfe’s film has moved a long way from its unsure start. Levee clutches the man he’s slain; in the back of her car, driving away from the studio, Ma looks dejected and exhausted. The two images differently capture the characters’ particular tragedies and the heft of ethnic history that August Wilson uses them to represent. Well into the last month of 2020, a succession of high-profile disappointments – Da 5 Bloods, Hillbilly Elegy, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7 – was getting me down. To some cineaste eyes, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom may not be properly filmic yet it’s a better screen drama than any of these others. Its story ends with a knife in the back but the film is a shot in the arm.
10, 18 December 2020
