For as long as black people have been making music, white people have been stealing and appropriating it. Country, Blues, Jazz, Rock ‘n Roll, Hip-Hop -the black architects of each of these have been popularly forgotten in favour of the white artists who came in their succession, incorporating (consciously or not) the styles and techniques innovated by black creatives. And the reason for this is because while these genres were built by and for black people, they were (and still largely are) sold to white people, and had to be if ever the artists were to make a profit -at least according to the white men who governed the American music industry. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens on a scene of the titular singer, nicknamed the “Mother of the Blues” (Viola Davis) performing in 1927 in a rural field somewhere in the American South to an audience of enthusiastic black spectators, clearly in-tune with the culture and parlance being expressed through her song. It’s not a spoiler to say that the film ends with a band of white men, all completely interchangeable, in a recording studio a few years later performing a similar song, the cadence and attitude of which they don’t in the least understand, to an audience presumably (if the record is successful) of thousands of white listeners.
This is the principal theme to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an adaptation of August Wilson’s award-winning 1982 play, set almost entirely in a Chicago recording booth, as Ma Rainey and her band prepare for her new record. It’s an artistic choice that she was pressured into by her white manager (Jeremy Shamos), and comes at a very heated time for her band (figuratively and literally -it’s an extremely hot day). She is tired, irresponsible, and unreasonable, and her band is falling apart mostly due to to the showboating and improvisation of her fiercely ambitious trumpeter Levee (the late Chadwick Boseman) -a constant thorn in her side.
Like a lot of movies adapted from plays, there isn’t a ton of cinematic versatility, the action being confined to a single day and space, as permitting a medium that is carried entirely by actors and their strength of performance. It is very easy to compare to the last August Wilson movie adaptation, Denzel Washingtons’ Fences, in part due to the ubiquity of Wilsons’ dialogue and the presence of Davis (who won her Oscar for the aforementioned film), but also because like that film it has no interest in hiding its’ theatrical roots. Plot is moved along strictly through character, the sets are notably claustrophobic, the staging incredibly deliberate, and there’s even a fairly obvious Chekhov’s gun. For direction, Tony-winning Broadway theatre alum George C. Wolfe was chosen, and he approaches the film accordingly like a play, though with some smart visual choices that do give it a greater energy, and actually allow it to be more dynamic than I found Fences. The camera really moves with the actors in flexible ways and the sense of confinement is much more thematically evocative -the band is forced to rehearse in a crummy basement room of the recording studio.
Though this is one of the bigger signs, the movie is filled with such details and small micro-aggressions that reinforce the power dynamic at play, particularly in what might otherwise be a comical relationship between Ma and her manager. She very much appears to have the power in the relationship, she’s the star and her needs must be met, and he needs her more than she needs him. But at the end of the day he still has sway over her, he still dictates the terms of her art. The band have a different attitude to the white authority figures they don’t have to interact with as often as Ma, jokingly chastising Levee, who’s much younger than them and talks a big game about his songwriting skills, personal autonomy, and starting his own band, for seemingly sucking up to the white boss and using the phrase “yes sir”. But that is what touches a nerve and ignites a deeply harrowing conversation about racism that recurs throughout the film, often in the form of stories, some personal, some anecdotal, related by the bandmates.
It’s here that I have to applaud one of the best casts of a movie this year. Viola Davis is superb as Ma, effortlessly resurrecting this influential singer in as powerhouse a way as you would expect, yet often drenched in sweat and excessive makeup that highlights her impropriety. And she can belt out a tune as good as any prohibition-era vaudevillian. Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, and Michael Potts are each great as the veteran musicians sharing a stupendous chemistry, Domingo and Turman especially stealing a couple scenes. But more often than not those scenes belong to Chadwick Boseman, and so does the movie, as the recently deceased superhero delivers maybe his greatest performance in his last on-screen role.
As the impetuous hot-shot of the group, and the avatar for a younger generation of African-American artists in conflict with the older generation represented by Ma and the other players, Boseman captivates you from his first frame and never relinquishes his grip. His energy and boundless self-confidence is addictive (as is his glorious smile), but so too is his deep and impassioned fury, his pent-up pain allowed expression through the direction of his exchanges with his bandmates and the white producers who control his fate, and also the constrained emotionality glimpsed when removed from their company. Levee is just a really great role, Davis called it the best for a black actor -and Boseman completely lives up to it and then some. Calling it now, he will win an Oscar for it; and between this and Da 5 Bloods, it’s all the more tragic that he is no longer with us in a year that would have been his.
He excels in the scenes of horrible recollections of racist violence as well as in those of him seducing Ma’s girlfriend (Taylour Paige), or asserting the superiority of his arrangement of the Black Bottom, or mocking Ma’s poor nephew (Dusan Brown) whom she insists on introducing her song in spite of a debilitating stammer. There really is a lot going on within that small building, a lot of themes being discussed in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; from theology (black peoples’ relationship to the tenets of white Christianity), to police discrimination, to discreet homosexuality, and even commentary on the fading jug band music scene (as Levee improperly calls it) and the rise of jazz. But all of it of course is wrapped in the culture of white supremacy, and how much Ma, Levee, and the rest are inescapably under its’ thumb.
It doesn’t matter how fancy your shoes are, they’re still the ones making you dance.
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