We’re almost out of 2020, folks. If I could sum up my feelings on this godforsaken write-off of a year, I’d chalk it up to the fact that nothing ever felt in my control. There was a feeling that everything bad, awful, or tragic that reared its head just happened to us, out of our hands. We had no agency, and those higher up who did, were either incompetent, uncaring, or both.
This is one of the ways that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of the legendary August Wilson’s stage play, manages to be relevant, and not just about the obvious reckoning that’s happening in regard to the worth of Black people’s lives. Everyone in this film is desperately jockeying for control, trying to confirm a stamp or a paycheck, worried about their positions not due to impostor syndrome, but the opposite – they know how precarious their success is when it’s controlled by white capitalists. It’s also relevant in being the unexpected final statement of a brilliant young artist. But we’ll get to that.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom mainly concerns itself with one swelteringly hot afternoon in a Chicago recording studio in the ‘20s. A backing band is ushered in by an overexcited manager, set themselves up in the basement and begin to wait for two people as they prepare. The first is obviously Ma Rainey herself (Viola Davis), who is arriving to record some of her tunes. The other is trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman), a hotheaded young musician who has his eyes on seemingly greener pastures despite getting to work for the ‘Mother of the Blues’, a much-adored performer. The main conflict between the two once they arrive is the arrangement of one particular song, the titular ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’, with the producers low-key favouring Levee’s more up-tempo version over Ma’s swoony original.
And this, being an August Wilson play, is the catalyst for fiery, riveting debates and arguments; this time on the nature of being a successful Black artist, the commercialisation of the art itself, and the struggle to retain any sense of ownership over it when the financial deck is stacked against you. I was lucky to be able to see a revival of the play almost five years ago now at the National Theatre, and – save for a few scenes that take you outside for a breather – the structure and its whip-smart dialogue are mostly intact, preserved well by screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The obvious recent comparison here is Regina King’s adaptation of One Night in Miami, another play set almost entirely in a single location, and both filmmakers are smart enough here to understand that the inherent claustrophobia here is essential to the experience and the drama.
Not that it ever feels too stagy, though. Wolfe, who cut his teeth as the original director of Angels in America (which might be the greatest play ever), knows how to make theatricality feel cinematic. It takes a special control to wring motion and energy out of limited space like a recording room or a basement, but you have nothing to worry about in his hands. He uses whip pans for energy, entertainingly retro zoom-ins to achieve a close-up — but the craft is best in his command of his small but stellar ensemble. When they all stop arguing or procrastinating, and finally get to work briefly for a recording of ‘Black Bottom’, Wolfe’s helming of their performance is absolute dynamite. From the film’s high-energy opening to a savagely funny racebending final scene, he doesn’t take his eye off the ball for a second.
The backing band is characterised individually, from Glynn Turman’s wearily sage pianist Toledo, Michael Potts’ amicably, witheringly neutral bassist Slow Drag, to Colman Domingo’s Cutler, a lovingly religious musician who loves what he does and where he is and won’t stand for someone who insinuates that it isn’t good enough. Taylour Paige as Ma Rainey’s moll Dussie Mai is radiantly seductive as much as young Dusan Brown’s performance as Ma’s nephew is adorably stuttery, and Jonny Coyne and Jeremy Shamos bring up the rear as the two white producers who would be entertainingly ridiculous if they weren’t stand-ins for the nefarious misuse of Black talent in the music industry.
However, this is a two-hander and the film knows it. Viola Davis is reliably, predictably superb as Ma, someone who isn’t actually in the film as much as you might think – but when she is on screen, she is the film. In being a story about performers, it has to also be a film about performance, and Davis in all her diva-y, confrontational glory, understands this. In a context full of exploitation and cheating of African-American performers and cash cows, Davis plays Ma as someone who knows every scrap of her worth and won’t lose a wink of sleep by fighting for it, but also knows that she shouldn’t have to fight this hard for it. She’s absolutely phenomenal.
But…
I can’t think of a single thing to hinge this review on other than Chadwick Boseman. This film belongs to him – and not in the way that it had been positioned after the tragic news of his passing. It’s simply that he gives the greatest performance in the film. His Levee is a talented musician (whose trumpet isn’t the only horn that motivates him); a disruptive force of nature amongst people who are comfortable and happy planting their feet where they are. From the opening where he upstages Ma for a fire-cracking trumpet solo, he provokes and galvanises everyone involved into articulating and sometimes questioning their positions on unanswerable questions, providing some of Ma Rainey’s most believable, human drama.
But he’s not some saviour with a divine truth or answer to Black people everywhere. Levee is crippled with an insecurity that waits patiently to reveal itself, and it has the potential to manifest into a destructively confrontational streak that does not endear him to anyone involved, despite his fantastic musical ability. He’s obsessed with creating his own band that pushes blues beyond what he believes to be old news in Ma’s style, and trying to pawn off his music to a producer who’s so obviously in it for himself that only someone like Levee could be blind to it. The fact that these scenes, and most of the film, seem to arrive at a very different conclusion to Sam Cooke’s argument in One Night in Miami, whilst still being just as valid, is another nail in the coffin of the backwards, condescending argument that there is some sort of monolithic Black experience that can be captured in film.
And Boseman, with the precision and range of a master, captures Every. Single. Note. His seemingly endless charm is only matched by an unstoppable rage, pain and sadness that cannot be put in the box once it comes out – like when Cutler accuses him of ‘dancing for the white man’ and Levee explodes into a controlled, incendiary monologue for the ages. And then, the smile and twinkle in his eyes, the easy confidence, it returns like nothing happened. The character Wilson created contained multitudes, and Boseman embodies all of them and then some.
There’s a tragically apt restlessness to every scene he controls. Both his character and his performance are haunted with the idea of potential unfulfilled – not dissimilar to the reverent way his character in Da 5 Bloods was lionised in the framing of both the character’s death and the actor’s. It’s a terrible clairvoyance that the best artists seem to possess, but in spite of that, it transcends to something resiliently beautiful. Here we have a capsule of Boseman at his absolute apex; he delivered an incredible performance, and he did it while he was dying (I couldn’t help but notice how thin he was when he first appeared). He’s not here anymore, and watching the film is heavy in our knowledge of that – but it’s another moving way in which he can live forever.
RIP Chadwick Boseman
1976-2020
‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ is playing in select cinemas and streaming on Netflix now.
