Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) * *

 

Directed by:  George C. Wolfe

Starring:  Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Jonny Coyne, Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, Michael Potts, Jeremy Shamos, Taylour Paige, Dusan Brown

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is based wholly around a Chicago recording session with the famed "Mother of the Blues."   Ma Rainey (Davis) by now has enough clout to run things her way (or so she thinks) and tell her manager and the album producer where to go if they don't listen to her.   Ma is forever threatening to walk and her weasel manager (Coyne) is forever trying to talk Ma back into the studio.    Ma is suspicious, truculent, and can belt out the blues, but although Viola Davis plays the role with gusto, it is a one-note performance mostly because Ma isn't seen as much else.   There are moments which suggest Ma's sexual relationship with the younger Dussie Mae (Paige), who is also hit on by the trumpet player Levee (Boseman) and her love for her stuttering nephew (Brown), but those are rare glimpses.    

Most of the focus on Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is on Chadwick Boseman in his final film role before his unexpected death from cancer in August.   A posthumous Oscar nomination is almost a lock, and possibly an outright win.   Boseman's Levee is by far the most complex character in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, as Ma's rage-filled trumpet player.   At first, Levee seems like a jovial, smart-ass young man showing off his new yellow shoes to his band mates, but as we listen to him more, we know he is a man boiling over with anger.   He tells a story of how his family was attacked by racist white men when he was a child, and he was left with physical and everlasting emotional scars as a result.  He hits on Dussie Mae more so as a hostile salvo towards Ma than any genuine romantic or sexual interest.   Boseman, even in declining health, is able to navigate Levee through some choppy dramatic waters and turns in his career-best performance; a career sadly cut short.  

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is based on the play by August Wilson, but like Denzel Washington's Fences (2016) there are too many instances in which we think we're watching a filmed version of a stage play.  The early banter between Levee and his other band members feels like we are watching a scene and not real life.   Because of this, we are not immersed fully in what is being said or suggested.    The final act of violence perpetrated by Levee is not unexpected, but the dramatic impact is lacking.   

The movie's final scene indicates a not uncommon phenomenon of white performers hijacking Ma's songs and pathetically trying to pass them off as their own.    It turns out there is little wonder why Ma looked at her manager and producer with an accusing eye.   She sensed that no matter how well she sang these songs which came from deep within her soul, they would be appropriated by someone else who didn't have the first clue about why Ma sang the blues in the first place.   Instead, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom gets to this point far too tangentially.