“ My Rainey’s Black Background ”: Netflix Movie Review

It’s hard to watch Ma Rainey’s black background – George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation of August Wilson’s star piece of the same name from 1982 – without remembering that this is Chadwick Boseman’s last film. (The film, which opens in limited theaters this week, will be streaming, on Netflix, on December 18.) It’s difficult in part because Boseman – playing the ambitious horn player Levee – gives a skillful turn and Humiliating in a role this is just one of many black men with classic and tragically compelling flaws that Wilson has brought onto the American scene. It’s the kind of performance that makes you miss Boseman. The kind of performance – full of flirtation and fire, common sense and craziness – that makes you want to see what else the actor would do.

This is in part because Boseman’s performance suggests the insight and dramatic acumen of an actor who understood this material in intimate terms, inside and out. Wolfe’s film, like Wilson’s play before it, is set in 1927 and takes a powerful interest (among many other things) in the dark value paradox – yesterday and today. It dramatizes the gap between the value of what black Americans have brought to this country – in this case, the critical role that black expression, like the blues, has played in redefining American music and culture. – and, on the other hand, lack of value imposed on black people by this same America. That’s the paradox that titular blues pioneer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) has in mind when she says, “They don’t care about me. All they want is my voice.

That’s why it’s so hard to watch My Rainey without thinking about this viral clip from Davis saying: “Pay me what I’m worth.” She was talking about her career, how a resume comparable to that of higher paying, comparatively skilled and educated actresses of her generation has not provided her with roughly the same amount of opportunity or compensation. It is a sharp and real monologue that stands out on its own. It could also have been an audition for this film, which – for all the ways a wonderful cake job from the makeup department sparked her with Ma Rainey’s iconic gold teeth and an irresistible almost gothic colored ring. around the eyes – partly works because it is so recognizable Davis.

Ralph Ellison wrote of the legendary Mahalia Jackson that there are “certain singers who possess, beyond all limits of our admiration for their art, a strange power to evoke our love. Ma Rainey, on the other hand – with her boastful moans, her abruptly sexual words, her hearty meal of emerging nervous and wet voices – evokes decidedly more forbidden – and forbidden emotions. The freedom of pleasure, to say nothing of its danger, springs from this voice. It’s a role that practically begs an actress: Go big.

And the great Davis goes – but not because this movie is exactly about Ma Rainey’s singing, though, obviously, it’s fair to give an actress as generous and daring in expression as Davis a chance to tear down the house with a lip sync which is worth its weight. in a decade of Drag race confrontations. This is how the movie begins: in the backwoods of Georgia, with blacks crawling through what at first appears to be perilous woodland darkness, like something out of a runaway slavery movie. Only those people, already free – even if they are marked with an asterisk – will see Ma Rainey sing. That’s part of the stake of that pleasure you hear in Ma’s voice, the fleetingness in her growl. It’s a bit shocking, then, to cut, mid-performance, that backwoods joint at a northern music hall, where Ma – now a big fan whose records are selling – has a bigger stage. to work, a more professional group, a bigger sound.

As Ma herself says in the film, the blues is not just a style or a way of making your voice heard. It is “the way of talking about life. You don’t sing to make yourself feel better. You sing because that’s how you understand life. Which is quite the point of the film. My Rainey, the film, follows Fences, the August Wilson adaptation directed by Denzel Washington from 2016, which also starred Davis with an Oscar. The pieces on which these works were based were released in reverse order in the 1980s and included the second and third works of Wilson’s nine-piece “Pittsburgh Cycle”. Wilson’s enduring interest in his career was to delve into, not something as simple as “the reality of black life” across 20th century America, but something distinctly mythical and poetic too: a reality. which always seemed to be aware of itself as a theater, which used spiritual symbols. (like the angel Gabriel, a repeated presence), great tragedy, archetype, handicap, maybe even something like magic, to give these lives a singular grandeur. It is the charm that they reserve for us in their best scenic interpretations.

This is also what makes the transition to cinema a little difficult to achieve in the same way – which in no way means that the film adaptations of Fences and My Rainey lack of power or satisfaction. It’s just a more humble power; the movies themselves don’t really shake your bones, don’t put your organs in their place, in the same way. But they each make incredible cases for the actors in there. I want to see Viola Davis by Fences drooling with grief close-up, in fact, thank you very much; I want to see Chadwick Boseman, in My Rainey, run wild in the eyes when the dramatic results heralded throughout the film, the failures promised to his character from the second he buys a new pair of shoes and shows off with an attitude, finally comes the climax of the story .

And I want to see the other actors – mainly Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, and Michael Potts like the rest of Ma’s group – spend a good chunk of the story nimbly poetizing their way through what almost feels like an exit movie. This is the problem My Rainey, by the way: this is the story of a recording session, and all the interpersonal friction intensified when we bring these people into a room. There are battles taking place here, crossing generational, ideological, artistic and other lines – and these conversations and tensions are what turn out to be enjoyable and fruitful.

It’s never fun for a film’s roots in the theater to feel like a limit to its potential as a film. There really shouldn’t be an obstacle. But when there is, it’s often because the language of the original materials is so rich, and the film is so tied to giving it (and acting) its due, that it all feels like one. little too much reigned. Wolfe adds a bit of historical digression, with photographs and paintings providing greater visual context to the story. But the main strength of this film is in Wilson’s words, his ease with ideas, symbols, and attitudes, and what the actors do with all of the above. The film, as a film, has its limits. But Wilson’s material remains unbound.