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How strange and wonderful to notice that even though Viola Davis’ true face is hidden under a layered cake of makeup and sparkle in Netflix’s “My Rainey’s Black Bottom”, her co-star Chadwick Boseman is just as unrecognizable. in the beginning. In the late actor’s latest onscreen performance – he died of cancer last summer at the age of 43 – everything we’ve come to associate with him disappears inside Levee, a Gifted trumpeter demanding recognition in a world that would make him scratch for the remains.
Levee is hungry for glory, but every step he shares with Ma Rainey is by his grace; each recording session is an extension of its queendom. Levee and the rest of the group are there to support her, although she could tell that their job is to stay out of her way. Davis’ Rainey is a hurricane shaking obstacles out of its way and commanding the center of attention. She takes up space and makes demands, the very definition of what lesser men would call difficult.
She knows how the world works. Most of the action in the play takes place in a Chicago recording studio where two white men plan to squeeze a record of his song, and a session that should be captured in one take lasts for hours. .
But this is how Ma takes care of herself and her family.
The black background is a dance that the white flappers appropriated from black southerners in the 1920s. It makes “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” a double meaning; it is about the dance, but also about the flesh of the singer and the plans that the whites have to erase her skin and her soul of the later products which they will draw from her work.
“All the boys in the neighborhood / They say your black ass is really good /
Come on and show me your black ass / I want to learn this dance, ”the lyrics tease.
Appropriation is the rule of the music market, as it would be for decades, as it is today. Ma knows that when the recording session is over, the white people who run the recording industry will take whatever she gives them, give her and the band a bite of their own for their time and earn thousands. others by pulling off their work.
His band members Toledo (Glynn Turman), Cutler (Colman Domingo) and Slow Drag (Michael Potts) know it too. They survive Ma’s moods with conspicuous patience, understanding that when she gets her way, everyone gets paid. If she refuses to sing before having that bottle of cold cola, her manager has promised to provide as part of the deal, so be it. They’re going to suffer her before they write her off with a $ 25 goodbye.
In August Wilson’s portrayal of the blues singer, Ma’s stubbornness is not an easily uprooted grass whose roots swim freely in liquid ego, but a vine that weaves its way between bricks, s’ hangs and proliferates. He listens to the promise and hard work inherent in the Great Migration, which director George C. Wolfe recognizes visually through illusory still images, animated by the occupants with a smile or small movements.
Under Wolfe’s direction, Davis captures this natural strength, filling the near space with the character’s warmth and sweat. Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler’s camera accentuates the humidity of this environment, lighting up even the sunniest rooms to produce an aura of trail. Nonetheless, Wolfe never downgrades Wilson’s language to a secondary character, which would be unwise.
He and writer Ruben Santiago-Hudson have teamed up previously for “Lackawanna Blues,” and in the same way that Santiago-Hudson shapes Wilson’s script with a light touch, Wolfe maintains the integrity of the play while using a cinematographic technique to reinforce the staging that Wilson carefully employs in his plays. Branford Marsalis’ moving score further accentuates this sense of belonging.
Wilson’s work offers actors a chance to dance with his signature dialect, the foundation of his work. The best performers of his work do not “act” through the seemingly easy language written throughout his dialogue, but tap into it and let it flow through them, as if to understand that the man wrote with a combination of ink and earth.
For any actor who brings his work to the screen, the challenge is to find a middle way between the strength that Wilson imbues his work by ensuring his power radiated to the last row and the intimacy of the theater. Denzel Washington (one of the producers of “Ma Rainey”) achieves this in the film adaptation of “Fences”, as does Davis, albeit tapping into a different kind of power.
Ma’s makeup is still liquid, but it’s Davis’ magma boil of a performance that ensures the black shadow covering her lids never got a chance to sit quietly in place. She makes her character a being made up of sensuality, anger and sweat. As Ma demanded in her day, Davis claims every scene she’s centered in without toning down her performances from her co-stars. As if it were possible.
Turman is solid of granite whenever the camera settles on him, meeting the power of Davis with an indulgence from years of living under Jim Crow, giving us a Toledo that is fair in nature but sublimates a deep disappointment on the world. In a metaphor-laden speech explaining the plight of blacks in America, he swings from wonder to sorrow in the span of a few beats, and his expressiveness spans the moment over years. This grace is a generous partner of Boseman’s acuity.
What we see here is that Boseman becomes not only Levee, a man, a trumpeter who craves fame and respect, but the very essence of starving willpower. As Levee, he drinks the world with his eyes, speaks through a crooked smile stretching his lips over his teeth. In a monologue that should earn him an Oscar if Academy voters use their eyes and common sense, his dike tells of a nightmarish crime that left him scarred, burning oxygen in the enclosed space where he and the rest of the group wait as he does. so.
Over the course of the film’s 94 minutes, Boseman transforms Levee from a man who rushes through the middle of a contentious conversation to someone who becomes entangled in himself until his withered pride inevitably consumes him.
People who watch Boseman’s Levee may be tempted to view his excellence as something driven by recognition of his impending death, but I don’t think that’s true. No one can really know if this played a part in his ferocity; more precisely, it qualifies the capacities of a man possessing a talent of which we will never know the extent. That we have a view of what could have been, if we had had more years, if he had had more time, is enough. What a farewell performance it is, and what a way to seal a legacy, ensuring that he and Wilson will live vibrantly in culture and memory for years to come.
“My Rainey’s Black Bottom” is currently airing on Netflix.
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