Film review

  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Small Axe (TV)

    Old YorkerFilm review, TV review

    Steve McQueen (2020)

    Steve McQueen’s anthology takes its title from the Bob Marley song of the same name, inspired by a Jamaican proverb – ‘If you are the big tree, we are the small axe’.  Mangrove, the first and longest of McQueen’s five films, opened this year’s London Film Festival but the TV scheduling of Small Axe signified more.  The films were aired, in consecutive weeks, in the high-profile Sunday 9pm slot on BBC 1.

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    Mangrove

    McQueen dramatises events leading up to the trial of the ‘Mangrove Nine’ in 1971, and the trial itself.  After repeated police raids on the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill (supposedly to find drugs on the premises, which the police failed to do), the restaurant’s owner, Frank Crichlow, and other Black activists organised a protest march to the local police station.  Violence broke out between the police and protesters; arrests were made and charges of incitement to riot brought.  Although the case was initially thrown out by a magistrates’ court, the Director of Public Prosecutions reinstated the charges and the nine defendants were tried at the Old Bailey.  The proceedings were especially remarkable for the unconventional legal tactics used.  Two of those charged – Darcus Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, both leading figures in the British Black Panther movement – chose to defend themselves. The defence also used a ‘trial by one’s peers’ argument (enshrined in Magna Carta) to press for an all-Black jury.  The judge rejected the argument but the defence, after objecting to sixty-three proposed jury members, did succeed in getting two Black jurors.  After a trial lasting fifty-five days, all nine defendants were cleared of the charge of inciting a riot.  Four received suspended sentences for lesser offences, including affray and assaulting police officers.

    In his speech before the jury is sent out to consider its verdicts, Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby) reminds the court that ‘we’ve heard a lot about Mangrove’.  The court has an advantage over viewers of McQueen’s film, which he wrote with Alastair Siddons.  Mangrove gives the impression that Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) had hardly opened the doors of his restaurant on All Saints Road before police raids began and the protest march was planned.  The restaurant actually opened in March 1968, well over two years before the demonstration took place.  During that time, the Mangrove Restaurant, according to an article by Ashley John-Baptiste on the BBC news website[1], not only ‘served the best Caribbean food in the area’, to the likes of Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Diana Ross – and Vanessa Redgrave.  It also ‘became a home from home for the Caribbean community – and a space for political discussion’.  Notting Hill at the time, writes Baptiste, ‘was not the sought after address it is today.  There were still undeveloped bomb sites from World War Two, many of the impressive white-rendered Victorian mansions had seen better days and an elevated concrete artery – the Westway motorway – was under construction, carving the area in two.  But because accommodation was cheap, many Windrush migrants … called the area home’.  If you didn’t already know that you wouldn’t get much sense of it from Mangrove.

    Steve McQueen isn’t interested in providing the kind of context supplied in Ashley John-Baptiste’s informative piece.  The director is impatient to get on to the flagrant, relentless racism of the Metropolitan Police and the impassioned fightback of those on the receiving end of it.  A couple of brief early sequences illustrate personal tensions between Howe and his then partner Barbara Beese (Rochenda Sendall), another of the Mangrove Nine.  In the pairing of the long-serving, racist police constable Frank Pulley (Sam Spruell) and his rookie sidekick Dixon (Joseph Quinn), there’s potential for the initial good cop-bad contrast to yield an illustration of how the younger policeman learns to be obnoxious, too.  But the film abandons character insight in favour of speech-making.

    There’s a striking lack of overlapping dialogue in Mangrove.  In the courtroom the regular bursts of jeering, agreement or applause from the public gallery are so neatly predictable that they sound canned.  Yet no matter how worked up anyone gets, in or out of the Old Bailey, they never interrupt the person who’s speaking.  This is to allow the activists and Ian Macdonald (Jack Lowden), the radical young Scottish barrister defending several of the nine, to say their reasonable piece, and the establishment figures – Judge Edward Clarke (Alex Jennings), the prosecuting counsel (Samuel West), the dimwit liar Pulley – to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

    This needn’t have been a limitation had McQueen made a polemic in an overtly unrealistic style but the film professes naturalism.  That Mangrove – long on declamatory rhetoric, desperately short of humour – is primitive and monotonous drama isn’t in doubt.  What’s at issue is why McQueen has treated the material this way.  He could, for example, have told the Mangrove Nine story from the particular perspective of one or more of the variously extraordinary defendants and, in doing so, created a substantial portrait of – to mention the most obvious candidates – Frank Crichlow or Darcus Howe or Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright).  Instead, McQueen merely pushes his audience’s outrage buttons by repeatedly showing the endemic racism to which all concerned were subjected.

    There’s not much to say about the acting except that the cast mostly follow their director’s lead.  The Black actors, for the most part, animate the ardent indignation of the people they’re playing – sometimes to powerful emotional effect – but can’t suggest much of their individuality except for being, in the cases of Howe and Jones LeCointe, super-articulate.  By the end of the film, it’s hard to remember who’s who among the other male defendants – Rupert Boyce (Duane Facey-Peason), Rhodan Gordon (Nathaniel Martello-White), Anthony Innis (Darren Braithwaite), Rothwell Kentish (Richie Campbell) and Godfrey Millett (Jumayn Hunter).  As Barbara Beese, Rochenda Sendall, a good actress, stands out negatively:  overplaying Beese’s anger from the start, she’s stridently one-note.  There’s always a risk of this when actors take the view (or the director’s instruction) that they don’t have a character to play so much as a political mission to accomplish.  Among the white actors, Jack Lowden manages to give Ian Macdonald, a pioneer of anti-racist legal practice, a bit of idiosyncratic wit.  And Alex Jennings’s crabby Judge Edward Clarke is an instructive figure.  ‘Take off that ridiculous hat,’ he tells one of the defendants.  The bewigged judge is as oblivious to his own headwear as to his racist condescension.

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    Lovers Rock

    This second film, a vibrant relief after Mangrove (and, at sixty-eight minutes, barely half as long), brings to mind the title of the Nik Cohn magazine article that was the source material for Saturday Night Fever – ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’.  The action of Lovers Rock, which covers less than twenty-four hours of a weekend in the summer of 1980, is set in and around a house in Ladbroke Grove, where a party takes place.  The young West Indians attending pay an entry fee of 50p on the door (extra for food and drink).  McQueen, who wrote the screenplay with Courttia Newland, showcases the cultural and courtship rituals of the gathering.

    Lovers Rock kicks off with an absorbing, amusing description of party preparations – a sofa lugged outdoors to the garden, checks on the sound system, food being prepared in the kitchen by women who, as they work, chorus Janet Kay’s recent reggae hit ‘Silly Games’ (and so anticipate a central sequence in what will follow).  Away from the house, we see Martha (Amara-Jae St Aubyn) getting ready to go out – and excited to escape from home.  She and her apparently more confident friend Patty (Shaniqua Okwok) take a bus to Ladbroke Grove.  Once the main event is underway there, McQueen strikes a balance between watching the partygoers en masse and focusing on a few individuals and how the night works out for them:  Martha and Patty; Franklyn (Micheal Ward) and his pal Reggie (Francis Lovehall), whom the two girls meet soon after arriving at the party; the volatile Clifton (Kedar Williams-Stirling), who turns out to be Martha’s cousin; and Cynthia (Ellis George), whose interaction with a man called Bammy (Daniel Francis-Swaby) goes worryingly further than she intends.

    The atmosphere – the movement of bodies to music, the sense of heat and sweat – is quite something.  You’re always aware, whether in the living-room-turned-dance-hall or the upstairs queue for the toilet, how many people are packed into a small space.  The combinations of colour, especially the glad rags (by Jacqueline Durran), are a marvel.  McQueen’s camera seems right inside the party, imbibing and distilling its spirit.  (As on all five Small Axe films, the DP is Shabier Kirchner and the editors are McQueen and Chris Dickens.)   Born in 1969, McQueen is slightly too young to recall house parties of this vintage as personal experience but may well have heard about them from family members.  Lovers Rock is aimed firmly at an audience who can say, ‘That’s just what it was like’ – or, at least, just how a parent or older sibling described it.

    It’s good, too, to get such a vivid impression of what a Jamaican disco smash like Carl Douglas’s ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, an international chart-topper in 1974, meant to British African-Caribbean youngsters of the time.   I was less taken – eventually – with what some rave reviews see as the film’s standout sequence.  After playing ‘Silly Games’, the selector, Parker B (Alexander James-Blake), has the gathering reprise the song a cappella, more than once.  As at the start, female voices dominate; some of the lyrics (written by Dennis Bovell, who has a cameo role in Lovers Rock) may express the romantic apprehension and frustration that the girls in this community really feel.  But the sequence goes on too long.  It turns into the latest example of a McQueen tendency going back all the way to Hunger (2008) – a set piece that’s formally remarkable but which, after a while, seems designed chiefly to impress and consequently outstays its welcome.

    A later, corresponding set piece for male partygoers, when a group of Rastas take over the dance space in a display of fervid, Jah-hailing abandon, is shorter and contrasts effectively with what follows.   With Sunday dawning, Martha and Franklyn leave the party together and go to the garage where Franklyn works.  He’s given Martha the impression he owns the place until his workmate Eddie (Frankie Fox), white and senior, puts in an unexpected appearance.  Briefly flustered, Franklyn makes a quick adjustment from Caribbean patois to Cockney ‘whitespeak’.  Eddie’s arrival at the garage may be contrived but Franklyn’s vocal change has real impact.

    Lovers Rock discloses a degree of tension between nostalgia and present-day perceptions of what is and isn’t acceptable male treatment of women:   the dance-floor groping that seems innocuous as it’s happening has a different retrospective charge after Bammy’s attempt to rape Cynthia, which Martha thwarts.   But Franklyn always stands out as clean-cut.  (He also has a great shirt – black with squares of bright colour that are like gems.)   As he sees Martha onto her bus home, they agree to meet up later in the day.  Amara-Jae St Aubyn and Micheal Ward (this year’s BAFTA Rising Star winner, presumably largely thanks to his work in Blue Story) are thoroughly persuasive and likeable.  Patty, piqued by Martha’s pairing off with Franklyn, leaves the party early.  That’s a pity:  the Junoesque Shaniqua Okwok is a strong, distinctive presence.  I’d have liked to see her given more to do.

    On the bus taking her and Patty to the party, Martha sees a man in the street below carrying a large cross.  He appears again at the bus stop as she starts her homeward journey and seems to embody the reality of Sunday morning after the Saturday night before.  There’s a Cinderella-back-from-the-ball flavour to the film’s ending: Martha sneaks into her bedroom and is barely under the covers before her mother shouts up that it’s time for church.  On a different religious note, the Rastas at the party naturally bring to mind thoughts of Babylon.  There’s a gaggle of white youths hanging around the house where the party’s going on but they’re easily deterred from making trouble by the formidable bouncer on the door.  All in all, Lovers Rock is an invigorating celebration of contemporary Black British life.

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    Red, White and Blue

    The protagonist of Red, White and Blue is another real-life hero, Leroy Logan.  Born in London in 1957 to Jamaican parents, Logan graduated in 1980 with a BSc degree from what was then North East London Polytechnic.  Three years later, he left his job as a research scientist to join the Metropolitan Police.  He became a founding member of the Black Police Association and served as its chair for thirty years.  Awarded an MBE in 2000 for his contribution to police work, he rose to the rank of superintendent and ‘was one of London’s top officers until his retirement seven years ago’.  That quote comes from the BBC news website and the other biographical facts are from Wikipedia. As in Mangrove, Steve McQueen isn’t concerned with this kind of detail; nor with Logan’s progress in the career that he saw as a vocation, with how hard won his eventual success may have been.  Red, White and Blue concentrates entirely on the racial prejudice Logan suffers as a junior officer and on the negative effects his joining the Met has on relationships with his father and other members of the local West Indian community.

    The film gets off to a promising start, nevertheless.  We see Leroy as a young adolescent (Nathan Vidal) waiting outside school, holding a musical instrument in its case.  Two white policemen approach, ask what Leroy’s doing and mention recent crimes in the neighbourhood, carried out by youngsters ‘like you’.  When he arrives to pick up his son Leroy’s father Ken (Steve Toussaint) speaks angrily to the police; as they drive home, he’s sharp with Leroy, too, telling him never to be a roughneck or get into trouble with the law.  The narrative then jumps forward a few years.  The young graduate Leroy (John Boyega) and his girlfriend Gretl (Antonia Thomas) are looking to move into their own place.  A brief, witty sequence in which they play Scrabble with Ken and his wife (Joy Richardson) is enough to suggest an easygoing happy family.  The Met has recently launched a campaign to promote the recruitment of Black officers and Leroy’s white policeman friend (Mark Stanley) encourages him to join the force.  Another friend, from childhood, is Leee John (Tyrone Huntley), currently enjoying pop chart success in the band Imagination; Leee’s mother (Seroca Davies) also urges Leroy to join the Met.  His own father is vehemently opposed to the idea, at this stage less because of the racial implications of doing so than because he’s proud of his son’s academic success and wants Leroy to pursue a scientific career.

    The brutal assault of Ken Logan by two white policemen is pivotal in the story but the event and its aftermath are used to reinforce the rift between father and son at least as much as to fuel Leroy’s professed mission to reform the Met from within.  The beating Ken takes doesn’t just confirm to him the wrong-headedness of Leroy’s decision to join the police; by becoming the poster boy for the Black officers recruitment campaign, Leroy helps thwart his father’s determination to have his day in court.  Once the Met realise who Ken is, they quickly drop the case they planned to bring against him.  McQueen may well intend to present the generational conflict as typical, with the father’s attitude reflecting learned, bitter awareness of how London police tended to treat West Indians, but Ken’s gruesomely personal and specific experience of this becomes too dominant a theme in Red, White and Blue.  This is especially so when the racism that Leroy has to endure, once he’s completed his police training, is generic – the racially insensitive conversations his white colleagues know that Leroy can hear, the abusive graffiti decorating his locker door.

    His shocked reactions to this kind of treatment makes you wonder what Leroy expected.  Red, White and Blue is reticent about this.  At the Met interview board, he tells the (white) panel he wrote ‘a load of stuff’ in his application about his reasons for wanting to be a police officer.  But whereas characters in Mangrove speechified in and out of the courtroom, McQueen and Courttia Newland give Leroy little opportunity to articulate his hopes and ideas, just the odd soundbite about ‘delivering change’.  This is all the more frustrating when he’s meant to be highly intelligent – a quality that John Boyega can only mime.  As a result, Leroy comes across, during much of the film, as singularly naïve, unaware of what’s obvious to his father and to others – including his co-worker Asif Kamali (Assad Zaman), another recent non-white recruit to the Met.   In the later stages, Leroy is sadder and wiser but not much more expansive.  He angrily reminds his father that ‘You wanted us more British than the British!’ but the film barely scratches the surface of this idea (unless it’s meant to be illustrated in Ken Logan’s penchant for Scrabble).  Asif quits the police.  When Leroy tells Gretl he’s thinking of doing the same, she gives him a no-nonsense pep talk, telling him how important he is to other members of his ethnic community – ‘people who respect you’.  Leroy doesn’t even mention to her that some of them have branded him a traitor.

    The physical settings for the action are impressive throughout.  A sequence in a factory, where Leroy tries to make an arrest single-handed and his radio calls for back-up are ignored, is very well made.  Despite the underwriting of his role, John Boyega’s charismatic presence holds Red, White and Blue together.  Mark Stanley isn’t on screen long but long enough for his characteristic warmth and authenticity to register.

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    Alex Wheatle

    Alex Wheatle is a well-established Black British novelist.  Much of his work, which is mainly for young adults, is set in Brixton, where he lived from the mid-1970s onwards.  McQueen’s film dramatises Wheatle’s early life in care and, less briefly, his first years in Brixton.   In 1981 he took part in the riots there and received a jail sentence.  McQueen and his co-writer Alastair Siddons use the prison cell as a locus for Alex (Sheyi Cole)’s reflections on his life so far, and the relationship that develops between him and his older, massively dreadlocked cellmate Simeon (Robbie Gee) as the starting point of the young man’s self-education and literary ambitions.  Simeon especially recommends to Alex, as a seminal text for the understanding of Black history and identity, C L R James’s The Black Jacobins – a work also referenced in Mangrove (in which James, played by Derek Griffiths, briefly appears).  Alex Wheatle is different from Red, White and Blue in that McQueen puts on screen closing text summarising the protagonist’s subsequent successful career – even though Wheatle’s name is likely already known to a wider public than Leroy Logan’s.

    Alex Wheatle opens with a gruelling piece of cross-cutting between the boy Alex (Asad Shareef-Muhammad) in a Croydon children’s home and the new arrival in prison.  The latter is nauseated by the sound and smell of Simeon’s diarrhoea, which triggers Alex’s memories of being punished for bed-wetting in the Croydon home.  (As a youngster, he suffers badly not only from enuresis but from asthma and eczema, too.)  The adult Alex and his fellow prisoner soon come to blows over the state of Simeon’s guts (the legacy of a recent hunger strike) and the eruptions it causes.  Following a struggle on the floor of the cell, Simeon asks Alex, ‘What’s your story?’  His question, as well as predicting Alex’s eventual vocation as a fiction writer, adjusts the retrospective narrative from something unfolding inside Alex’s head to an account he gives to Simeon.

    This fourth film has strengths and weaknesses evident in earlier pieces of the Small Axe anthology.  Brixton in the 1970s and Alex’s acculturation – to the music, the ganja and drug-dealing, the West Indian patois – are persuasively described.  Alex Wheatle is relatively awkward, though, when it comes to making pivotal events happen and when its characters talk racial politics.  As a teenager in Brixton, Alex is highly active in the local music scene, working as a DJ and writing songs.  His politicisation occurs abruptly, in light of the fire at a house party in New Cross in January 1981, which killed thirteen Black kids aged between fourteen and twenty-two and whose aftermath was responsible for a significant negative shift in British African-Caribbean attitudes towards the police and the media.  Three decades later, Darcus Howe described the crime (as it might well have been) as ‘the blaze we cannot forget’.  The New Cross fire clearly could have transformed Alex’s outlook but in McQueen’s hands this has the quality of dramatic necessity rather than felt enlightenment.  Sheyi Cole is a credible blend of ingenuousness and sharp wits but Alex Wheatle seems increasingly in two minds as to whether its title character is an extraordinary individual or ethnically and generationally representative.

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    Education

    In the opening scene, twelve-year-old Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy) is on a school trip to the London Planetarium.  He wonderingly watches the heavens, hears a voice explain the creation of the universe.  Kingsley is a bright kid – he says he wants to be an astronaut – but he struggles to read.  His elder sister Stephanie (Tamara Lawrance), educationally a higher flyer, knows Kingsley’s problem but also that he doesn’t want their parents to find out, and she keeps her brother’s secret.  His headmaster (Adrian Rawlins) decides the boy, who has performed poorly in an IQ test, should transfer to Durrants, a ‘special’ school.  Kingsley’s mother Agnes (Sharlene Whyte) is shocked but she doesn’t argue with the head.  Her husband Esmond (Daniel Francis) is relaxed about having an ESN son.  Esmond is a carpenter; Kingsley can follow suit.  ‘It’s a good trade,’ his father says.

    At Durrants, the pupils are of widely varying ages and learning difficulties but apparently ‘taught’ (a euphemism) as a single group.  For a child of Kingsley’s intelligence, the place is stultifying and demoralising but he protests to his mother in vain.  One day, he tries to escape from Durrants and, on his way out, bumps into a visitor to the school, who introduces herself as Hazel, a psychologist (Naomi Ackie).  It’s a turning point.  Soon after this encounter, Agnes receives a visit from another woman, the elegantly articulate Lydia Thomas (Josette Simon), who explains that IQ tests are designed to disadvantage children from a West Indian background and special schools to ensure that kids will leave them with next to no prospect of getting a decent job.

    Agnes is angrily suspicious at first but she goes along to a public meeting, led by Lydia and Hazel, where other Caribbean parents inveigh against their child’s treatment at the hands of the Inner London Education Authority.  When Agnes returns home and tries to make Kingsley read, he tries, fails and breaks down in tears.  His contrite mother becomes part of Lydia’s group of activists.  On Saturday mornings, Kingsley starts going to breakfast classes at the home of a local woman called Tabitha Bartholomew (Jo Martin) whose approach to education is as effective as it’s imaginative.  In next to no time, it seems, Kingsley is reading fine.  As the planetarium prologue hinted, the sky’s the limit.

    During her bitter excoriation of ILEA at the town hall meeting, Lydia Thomas exclaims, ‘Don’t make me laugh!’  I wish Lydia hadn’t made me laugh but Josette Simon’s imperious, theatrical playing ensured an uphill struggle to keep a straight face – ditto the contributions from the audience at the meeting.  Each speaker, within a few seconds of opening their mouth, turns into a speech-maker.  It’s easy to forgive the actors concerned, understandably making the most of their two-minute roles.  A well-known actor like Simon, in a bigger part, is a different matter.  The only thing you believe about Lydia is that, on their first meeting, she quickly grates on Agnes Smith’s nerves.  The only interesting aspect of Simon’s portrait is that you’re fooled, for a while, into thinking ghastly, patronising Lydia will have to be revealed eventually to be a charlatan.  But no, she’s the real, politically impassioned thing – a force for positive change.  She also epitomises the superior earnestness of the film she’s in.

    Steve McQueen has said that, as a schoolboy in Hanwell, he struggled with dyslexia as well as institutional racism.  In Education, he uses the former as a channel for the expression of the latter.  In a reading lesson, Kingsley is mocked by his teacher.  In a music group, he chants, as a substitute for lyrics in ‘London’s Burning’, ‘Suck my dictionary’; a different teacher turfs him out of the class.  Half a century ago, it was hardly unusual for dyslexia to be ignored or to go undiagnosed in children regardless of their ethnicity; and it’s unlikely that a white kid wouldn’t have received a similar reprimand for singing the lyrics Kingsley sings (nicely as they hint at his preoccupation with mastering words).  Although the two incidents together hardly clinch the racialist case McQueen is making, they’re virtually all we see ahead of Kingsley’s banishment to Durrants (where most of the other kids are white).  Because the film is so sketchy in these early stages the later denunciation of racism, at the public meeting etc, has to compensate – one reason why that is so overdone.  The final, rapid vanquishing of Kingsley’s reading difficulties once he has an empathetic Black teacher serves to confirm that racial discrimination, rather than dyslexia, was the problem all along.

    McQueen would have started secondary school around 1980 but this last of the Small Axe films is contemporary with the first of them, taking place ten years earlier.  We know it’s 1970 because Lydia tells Agnes she must write a letter of complaint to the newly-appointed education secretary – ‘a woman … Margaret Thatcher’.  The film’s purpose is to expose entrenched racism in the education system.  Thatcher was newly appointed because the Tories had only just returned to power.  Yet McQueen and Alastair Siddons can’t resist invoking the primary political hate figure of the years ahead, as if things were already her fault.  Don’t make me laugh again.

    In fact, there’s a regular supply of inadvertent comedy in Education.  Early on, McQueen has Kingsley, then Stephanie saying their bedtime prayers.  Stephanie reminds God of her ambition to be a successful fashion journalist:  although her naïve egotism is clearly meant to be humorous, the prayer is actually a laugh because it’s ludicrously overwritten.  Funnier still is a scene between Kingsley and his mother outside their front door.  Agnes, arriving home, sees Kingsley approaching the house.  As he comes up the path, she starts firing questions at him about what’s going on at Durrants.  The conversation, a private one that neither mother nor son would want anyone else to hear, goes on at high volume, and for what seems ages, until Agnes thinks to step inside the house that she and Kingsley live in.

    At least that Thatcher reference is brief.  McQueen is more tediously heavy-handed in a sequence at the special school, where a teacher, accompanying himself on the guitar, sings to Kingsley and the other pupils a torturously protracted version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’.  It’s a hell of a wait for the scene’s punchline – the teacher asks who the song’s by, no one speaks, the teacher says, ‘the Animals’.  His vindictive delivery suggests that, rather than giving the kids an answer, he’s expressing his opinion of them (all of them, not just the little girl in the class who habitually makes animal noises instead of speaking but is struck entirely dumb by the boringness of sir’s rendition).

    Education’s characterisation of teachers is entirely unsympathetic.  There’s never a hint that any of them might feel trapped in, or frustrated by, the system employing them.  Instead, they’re deliberately, almost spitefully, racist.  All but one are male:  that the exception, at Durrants, doesn’t come across as a token female is because she’s (a) given the most verbally abusive lines and (b) played by scary-looking, overemphatic Kate Dickie.  Like the men, this woman lights up a fag at the first opportunity.  These teachers seem to inhale venom in their cigarette smoke.

    All four actors in the Smith family are good, which makes McQueen’s tunnel-vision tendentiousness all the more exasperating.  Education might have been stronger with more focus on the parents – on how they manage, for different reasons, to overlook their son’s reading difficulties (as well as be largely oblivious to their daughter’s career aspirations).  Agnes is continuously overworked:  she works two jobs, as a nurse and a cleaner, as well as keeping house.  Esmond is resigned to the limits of what West Indians can achieve in Britain.  These things are virtual givens in the film, however, rather than themes that it explores; and McQueen’s refusal to qualify the Smiths’ wholesomeness attenuates his portrait of the family.

    It’s convincing that Stephanie keeps her brother’s secret from their parents because she knows how much it worries Kingsley.  It would be even more convincing if, when Agnes discovers the truth, she got angry and upset with Stephanie for not telling her sooner.  Instead, mother and children go into a silent group-hug tableau – an almost sculptural image.  (Or ‘scuptural’, as Kingsley’s friend Sajid (Jairaj Varsani) gets told off for saying, as he misreads in the English class where Kingsley is the laughing stock.  As in Red, White and Blue, the British-Asian character in the story is presented, mechanically, as a minor victim of white racism.)   When Stephanie escorts Kingsley to Tabitha Bartholomew’s, the latter insists they both come in; later, she asks Stephanie to read to the younger kids.  You might have thought a would-be Vogue journalist would resent this a bit, think she was slumming it.  If only Stephanie did.  Instead, she reads the African folk tale that Tabitha hands her as if this were Sunday school rather than Saturday school.  It’s quite a change from the way that Stephanie said her prayers.

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    The December 2020 issue of Sight & Sound has Steve McQueen on the cover and a Small Axe feature inside.  As well as David Olusoga’s interview with McQueen, there’s a piece on each of the five films by a different Black British author or academic.  Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, who writes about Mangrove, laments ‘the daily diet of Whiteness [sic]’ and notes ‘how refreshing it was to hear the range of Caribbean accents and the embrace of dialect that will sail far over the heads of many viewers’.  The comment is dispiriting in its exclusivist implication but also, fortunately, irrelevant – at least for those of us lucky enough to have a Smart TV.  Anyone keen to be sure what’s being said can watch Small Axe with the subtitles turned on.

    Surely Steve McQueen can’t endorse Kehinde Andrews’s view on this.  By the time Education aired, on 13 December, its schoolroom settings seemed only too apt.  Except in the impressive Lovers Rock, McQueen is out to deliver a lesson in Small Axe.  He has said of the films generally that they’re stories of Black British experience that ‘need to be told’.  That’s unarguable – as is the fact that the BBC scheduling enabled more people to find out about the Mangrove Nine, Leroy Logan and others than might otherwise have been the case.  The historical and persisting importance of these films’ subject matter will lead many to consider their dramatic substance and imagination unimportant but I can’t do this.  The defects of Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), McQueen’s best cinema features, don’t prevent their being complex and considerable pieces of work.  That’s just what the politically serious films in the Small Axe anthology are not.  They are, rather, the latest reminder that the current political climate tends to be bad news for good political drama.

    15 November, 22 November, 29 November, 6 December, 13 December 2020

     

    [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/jGD9WJrVXf/the-mangrove-nine-black-lives-matter

     

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