George C Wolfe (2023)
I didn’t get very far with Rustin on Netflix – this is a note just to remind myself why, and not to try again if the opportunity arises. George C Wolfe tells the story of how social and political activist Bayard Rustin overcame the odds – Rustin was gay, decidedly left wing, a controversial figure in the civil rights movement – to organise the March on Washington in August 1963. Right from the start, the audience is getting a clunky history lesson. The dialogue is blatantly expository: leading lights of the campaign for civil rights keep telling each other things they must already know. And they’re oratorical to a man (most of them are men). Never mind the March on Washington – whenever two or three are gathered together in this film they speechify.
The screenplay is credited to Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black: Rustin makes it hard to believe the latter once wrote a script as good as Milk (2008). George C Wolfe – best known as a theatre director although he did a pretty decent job with the screen adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) – seems vaguely aware of the problem. He pours Branson Marsalis’s music onto the soundtrack in the vain hope that its jazz fluidity will somehow oil the creaking words that his high-powered African-American cast must deliver. Colman Domingo’s performance in the title role has been widely praised, even tipped for an Oscar nomination[1]. The real Bayard Rustin was reputedly magnetic and Domingo is certainly that but his energy is counterproductive. It serves mainly to sharpen awareness that Wolfe is showcasing the lead performance (he tended to do that with the lead performances in Ma Rainey, too) – and that his film-making is otherwise inert. I didn’t progress far beyond a scene in which a roomful of activists start to discuss plans for Washington. Each says their line or two in turn (forget about overlapping dialogue). They’re all eager and smiley – and a deplorable travesty of a game-changing political undertaking: the civil rights movement as the Kids from Fame.
20 January 2024
[1] Afternote: And got one … (!)
