James Baldwin, in his No Name in the Street, wrote, “It is terrible to watch people cling to their own captivity and insist on their own destruction.” Whether or not August Wilson had read his Baldwin when he composed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or had simply come to a like conclusion, he produced a stunning example of Baldwin’s tragic observation. In a world controlled by the white population, Wilson declares that the sad recourse for the oppressed, angry and frustrated Black population is not to tangle with the oppressors but to destroy itself.
The play elevated Wilson to the forefront of American playwrights when it opened on Broadway in 1982 as the first of his eventual 10-play cycle about 20th-century African-Americans. (Evidently, he had already written Jitney.) Now it’s translated into a movie that—if anything, as directed by George C. Wolfe from a Ruben Santiago-Hudson adaptation—is as powerful on screen as it is on stage. Perhaps even more so. Cue a resounding fanfare for its unpulled punch to the solar plexus.
The setting is a Chicago recording studio, where “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and four-man band have come to lay down a series of songs. They’re supervised—as much as Rainey tolerates supervision (not at all)—by her obsequious manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) and shifty studio owner Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne). (Longtime jazz fans may see in Sturdyvant a forerunner of Phil and Leonard Chess of Chicago’s Chess Records, who simultaneously championed and exploited later black artists. Many things in stateside society never change.)
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Although Wolfe and Santiago-Hudson precede the roiling studio session with opening footage of Rainey performing to excited audiences in the South and North as well as including some fiery outdoor Chicago scenes, they do stick to Wilson’s view of what might have gone on in the overheated studio rooms.
True to her tardy self, Ma Rainey arrives late with prone-to-wiggle girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) and stuttering nephew-chauffeur Sylvester (Dusan Brown). As much as she swallows all the oxygen in those quarters when she’s on the premises—watch her spit the words “my way”—she leaves the band members who’ve arrived on time to lift the plot instantly from terra firma and into Wilson’s world of hardscrabble poetry.
The most vocal of the funky musicians is maverick trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman), who’s content to be there for the money he’ll make to buy things like the new ash-yellow shoes he flaunts even as he insists he’ll play the song list the way he likes. He’s convinced his hepped-up approach is what the public is hankering for and not the “jug band” sound Ma still promotes.
Jawing with band leader/trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), piano tickler Toledo (Glynn Turman), and bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), Levee persists in his view of the best and worst aspects of the divided American culture. It’s his intensity and, indeed, his hard-earned understanding of a godless, racist nation that dictates the eventual disintegration that Wilson sets forth as if an unrelenting musical riff.
Just as entrenched in her ways, Ma Rainey rules over the proceedings, fully aware of her proscribed value to Sturdyvant. She’s primed to take advantage of whatever she can. At one point she holds up the recording session while she waits for her required bottles of Coca-Cola. At another she demands that Sylvester repeat his spoken intro to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” until he does it without stuttering. Only then will she sing the signature song with her usual gritty joy. (But for one early number, Maxayn Lewis does the sound-alike Rainey bluesing.)
Truth be told, it’s Ma Rainey’s name in the title, but perhaps because Santiago-Hudson has trimmed the original script (Wilson never really liked trimming), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is as much Levee’s movie as it is Ma’s. She remains her blunt self right up to a final ferocious stare, while Levee thunders through a series of fraught scenes—one where he romances Dussie Mae—that has him finally getting on the other members’ last nerve.
His unquenchable ire culminates in an explosive don’t-you-step-on-my-ash-yellow-shoes that’s the result of an immediately previous run in with the proprietor white man. Levee’s channeling pent-up fury elsewhere is Wilson’s devastating demonstration of Baldwin’s “insisting on their own destruction.” It’s a heart-crusher as potent during the Black Lives Matters age as it was in 1982—or, for that matter, as it was in any of this country’s successive ages since 1619.
While Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is almost by definition musical, music is an abiding Wilson theme. Not only does he thread melodies and references to melodies throughout his cycle—what might be considered his Pittsburgh Mill Hill cycle—but his dialogue often feels like a succession of operatic arias, or, given the blues theme here, a series of down-and out blues.
Everyone is handed at least one—Toledo’s story of his marriage is a grabber—but Ma’s suddenly mellow disquisition on her love of the blues and Levee’s description of why he has no regard for an unforgiving God are the standouts. If the properly heavy-set Davis and/or the lean, prowling Boseman (in his final performance) nab this year’s Oscars for their appearances, their leonine delivery of these lines will be a large part of the wins.
Director Wolfe, known for his impressive theater work over several decades, has made one previous film, the eminently forgettable 2008 Nights in Rodanthe (Diane Lane, Richard Gere and Davis are wasted in it). He now establishes himself as a first-rank moviemaker. Aided by cinematographer Tobias Schliessler, editor Andrew Mondshein, and music coordinator Branford Marsalis, his Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is fresh, fast, articulate. Wolfe’s searching camera unfailingly finds the right place to be among these kinetic figures. Under him, the actors bare the souls their characters bare to endure their strait-jacketed existences.
But they have their music, which they start to play on the familiar musician’s uttered downbeat that goes, “One, two, you know what to do.” So for anyone seeking disturbing, exhilarating entertainment, well: One, two, you know what to do.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the motion picture version, will be streamed beginning December 18. 2020. Information: netflix.com
