In the Gospels, Christians are enjoined to love their enemies. There may be a self-defensive aspect to that admonition: hatred is corrosive and destructive and, often, turns inward. It's probably better not to hate, not so much for the sake of our enemies, but for our own sake. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020, Netflix) is single-minded in its focus on hatred -- indeed, it is an anatomy of hate, demonstrated with the persuasive force of a theorem, though the two main characters in this handsome film version of August Wilson's play. Levee, the gifted cornet player in Ma Rainey's Blues band, squanders his future by committing a murder that the world will adjudge as senseless although there is plenty of good reason for the man's fury. Ma Rainey presents a different picture of rage -- she feels perpetually undervalued, disdained by the White businessmen that she must rely on her for her wages, and seems happy only when singing (although then she seems transcendentally pleased with herself); hatred is her sustaining energy -- but it doesn't make her happy and blights her life and the life of those around her. Ma Rainey's fate, in some ways, is the more tragic -- Levee, at least, is out of his misery; she's condemned to life.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is powerful, but depressing. The acting is first-rate, particularly incandescent performance by Chadwick Boseman (as the doomed Levee) and Viola Davis (Ma Rainey) -- this actors transform themselves through their performances: Viola Davis is a sacred monster, a Medusa, with her huge moist eyes encircled by midnight eye-shadow, most of her enormous bosom bare and heaving, resting like some kind of imperious Queen of the Night on a chair that becomes a throne under her weight, legs spread wide like an old, fat man. Boseman skillfully modulates his performance from casual jive to hair-trigger rage: he seems likeable enough at first, but, pretty soon, it's evident that a strong undertow of menace threatens everyone around him: he flails around, but he's obviously going under, and his spasms of fury are the dying gasps of a drowning man. The play is a typical product of its time -- the "well-made" play of the 1970's. It has tight unity of place, a small ensemble cast, and is designed to allow each of its major players one or two showy monologues. The language soars, but is, sometimes, a bit unconvincing, Nonetheless, when Wilson wants to make a point, he does so with a sledge-hammer. There's no ambiguity here and nothing much to interpret: Wilson depicts Black people so convulsed by hatred that they turn their rage against inward with calamitous effects. The tragedy, of course, is that the rage is fully warranted, a rational response to the violent racism imposed upon these characters -- therefore, justifiable anger becomes, in the end, the vehicle for the destruction of these characters: Wilson's protagonists don't really have a "fatal flaw" -- their anger is justified: the problem is there is no viable means to express this anger that isn't fatal to the enraged person. Levee murders the best and kindest musician in his band and will no doubt be imprisoned for the rest of his life; Ma Rainey's soul is dead except when she is performing -- otherwise, she's a kind of viciously selfish automaton. Wilson, who was a separatist and, probably, a Black supremacist, indulges in a little racism of his own -- the movie has a couple of scenes in which African Americans indulge themselves in shop-worn mysticism about the Blues and deny that White people can even understand the music, let alone perform it. (This would be like arguing that Blacks can't perform opera and shouldn't even attempt Schubert). Wilson's earned his prejudices, of course, and it may be unseemly for me to even mention them, but the mystical notion that the Blues (and Jazz) are uniquely the birthright of Black Americans seems to me a little pernicious.
The director George C. Wolfe opens up Wilson's claustrophobic, essential;y one set, mise-en-scene, but just a little. Of course, the sense of confinement, even, carcereal enclosure, that Wilson's play engenders is crucial to its meanings and, therefore, Wolfe does well by not attempting to make the movie too "cinematic." There's an opening scene of two Black kids running through a forest that toys with our expectations -- we think the boys are fleeing from a White lynch mob, but instead they're hurrying to see Ma Rainey perform at a rural juke joint. A couple of spectacular Blues scenes at the outset of the movie set up the stakes in the film -- that is, the glory of the music as opposed to the squalor visited upon those who perform it. There's a car wreck scene in which Rainey's limousine is damaged featuring a nasty Irish cop and a mob of menacing White people and a scene in which a couple of band members go into a delicatessen full of mean-looking Caucasians adds to the general sense of racial dread oppressing the characters. Wolfe is a good director of actors and his scenes exploit the snap, fizzle, and pop of Wilson's dialogue -- Wilson is always compelling on a line by line basis. Like Wilson, Wolfe works in a heavy-handed and obvious way: Levee is continuously fiddling with a locked door in the recording studio -- when he finally busts it open, the door simply leads to another equally confined and dead-end space. (The film also features a montage of noble-looking and oppressed Black folks, a kind of portrait gallery -- this device has been used in Spike Lee's last two films and in about a dozen other movies as well and, to be honest, it's time to give this technique a rest.)
Wilson engineers a number of conflicts in the play. Levee seduces Dulsey Mae, Ma's girlfriend. This sub-plot doesn't go anywhere -- Ma plans to fire Levee for messing around with her squeeze when they get back from Chicago to Memphis, but Levee self-destructs before then. Levee wants to play hot jazz of the sort that Louis Armstrong pioneered -- he disdains what he calls "jug band" music. But everyone conspires against that ambition: Ma won't let him spice up her Blues performances (like many Blues artists, she's a purist); the White record executives exploit Levee -- they buy his new tunes at $5 dollars a pop but, then, adulterate them in a grisly way by selling the songs to White musicians (who tame them for the ears of White audiences.) Levee has purchased some bright yellow shoes -- he likes to look fine. These shoes are like Chekhov's gun -- if you show shoes in the first act, the shoes better detonate by the end of the play. Levee gets two impressive monologues, really Shakespearian-style soliloquies: when one of the band members says that he's "spooked up" by the White man, Levee launches into a harrowing account of how he saw his mother gang-raped by White thugs, was almost stabbed to death, and not treated by a (presumably) White doctor who was busy mid-wifing a cow. He boasts about how his father hunted down the White assailants and killed four of them before he was caught, hanged, and his corpse burned. Later, Levee denounces Jesus for not rescuing his mother when she called out for help. This leads to a knife fight with the band leader Cutler who seems to be a Christian. (The knife fight foreshadows the film's denouement a few minutes later in which Levee stabs Toledo, a kindly and philosophical old Black man, who has accidentally tread on Levee's yellow shoes. (The two incidents with the knife seems one too many.) Cutler gets an impressive speech about the way White men humiliated a Black preacher who accidentally found himself in a racist Southern village after dark -- this is the speech that triggers Levee's nihilistic assertion that "life is nothing" and "death kicks life's ass" and has more impressive style to boot. "God hates niggers," Levee says. "Jesus hates you!" he says to an outraged Cutler. Ma Rainey also has a powerful soliloquy in which she denounces the music industry for not caring about her and for despising her even as the White businessmen make money off her talent;. (This speech is racially inflected but, I think, more broadly applicable to the relationship between business and art in general. The recording industry is set up to make money and the relationships between artists, their agents, and the business professionals who run the industry are heartless and purely instrumental -- you're only as valuable as your ability to make money for the company.) A dramatic problem with these lacerating monologues is that they are so powerful and emotionally overwhelming that there's no place for the narrative to go after someone has spoken so decisively and to such a scarifying effect. -- the action simply has to stop and cut away. After all, how do you respond to a lengthy monologue about someone's mother being gang-raped? These speeches make their points effectively but they have the effect of suggesting that the plot is just a mechanism to give these characters their soap-boxes from which to orate.
Some critics have suggested that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the best film of the year. I don't necessarily disagree except that I haven't seen too many recent movies and, of course, we don't know whether there is another Ingmar Bergman or Orson Welles working this year in Turkey or Singapore or China. (It's unfair but I wonder what Charles Burnett, I think America's greatest Black director, would have done with Wilson's play.) It's eerie to see Chadwick Boseman as Levee railing against the heavens like King Lear and demanding that God strike him down if He exists for this blasphemy. Boseman, of course, died at 42 of cancer shortly after the movie was made. The film's points are encapsulated in a gruesome coda in which a pale moon-faced White man (he looks like Paul Whiteman) mechanically plays Levee's song "Jelly Roll" in the squarest of all square versions. It's like the "St. James Infirmary" played by Lawrence Welk.
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