Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the second in the series of producer Denzel Washington’s proposed big-screen adaptations of August Wilson’s landmark “Century Cycle” chronicling the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century. The only one of Wilson’s 10-play cycle, often known as the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” not set in that city’s Hill District, and the only one to feature a historical character, Ma Rainey takes place in a Chicago recording studio in 1927. A group of session musicians gather to record an album of songs by the influential singer dubbed the "Mother of the Blues," Gertrude "Ma" Rainey. As the band waits for Ma to arrive they tell stories, banter, argue, and philosophize. It quickly becomes apparent that the talented, hotheaded young trumpet player, Levee, sees this gig of playing back-up on a bunch of Ma’s old hits—“Jug Band Music,” as he dismissively calls them—as a mere stepping stone on his career path. He dreams of his own band recording his own modern jazz compositions—music he believes better captures the spirit of the time. The tension escalates when Ma arrives, makes demands of both the band and her frustrated White producers, and insists that her stuttering nephew deliver the spoken introduction to her song “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.” The play explores issues of intraracial relations, intergenerational conflicts, artistic temperament, the historical tensions between northern and southern Blacks, and the still timely issue of the exploitation of African-American performers by White music producers and businessmen. It’s one of the liveliest of Wilson’s works, with rapid-fire dialogue that crackles and stings.

The first film of this series, Fences (2013), which Washington directed and starred in alongside a radiant Viola Davis, transferred that show’s 2010 Broadway revival—with its full cast and most of the production team—to the big screen with a screenplay adaptation by Wilson that featured no attempts to open the play up into something more cinematic. Shot on location in Pittsburgh, Washington’s film exists in a naturalistic setting but no one involved in that movie tries to deliver Wilson’s brilliant theatrical dialogue and lyrical monologues as if they were everyday conversation. Still, the film doesn’t possess the full power of a live performance, because one of Wilson’s greatest strengths was his mastery of the medium he worked in, and Fences is perfectly conceived to unfold on a stage where viewers can discover on their own the layers of metaphor, allegory, and subtext that are in front of them the entire time. Much is lost when each idea gets delivered directly to the viewer via the juxtaposition of visual images. Still, Fences feels like a rare and remarkable document of a Broadway triumph in which each role was perfectly cast, that resonates beyond what a mere recording of the stage show can capture.

Ma Rainey is brought to the screen by a legend of the New York theater world, George C. Wolfe, former artistic director of The Public Theater and producer/director of such landmark stage productions as Angels in America, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, Elaine Stritch At Liberty, and the 2006 Central Park production of Mother Courage and Her Children starring Meryl Streep. The screenplay comes from Ruben Santiago-Hudson, known for appearing in Wolfe’s first major production, Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), and for writing and starring in the autobiographical play Lackawanna Blues (2001), which was made into an HBO movie directed by Wolfe.

The film of Ma Rainy does not transfer an existing stage production to the screen. Many in the cast have appeared in stage productions of the show, but the unity of an intact ensemble is not on display here like it is in Fences. The two above-the-title performances, Davis as Ma and Chadwick Boseman as Levee, come from opposite ends of the tour-de-force spectrum. Boseman’s Levee is all cocky energy, with the actor never sitting still even while playing his trumpet. Boseman finds an undercurrent of insecurity in his depiction of the character, which he deftly covers with all Levee’s fast-talking bluster. Viola Davis plays Ma like… well like Viola Davis—with power and intensity. She moves slowly and speaks laconically, barely raising her voice even in the most heated exchanges. Like Ma, she uses her well-earned gravitas, and the fact that nothing we see would be happening without her participation, to ground and drive the action.

Wolfe attempts to lean into the extra-textural fact that his leads are played by movie stars and the rest of the supporting characters are played by veteran stage and TV actors. The trio of session musicians is played by Glynn Turman (whose credits date back to the original 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, and is well remembered for roles in the film Cooley High and the iconic TV series A Different World and The Wire), Colman Domingo (of the stage and filmed versions of the critically acclaimed rock musical Passing Strange), and Michael Potts (from the smash-hit musical The Book of Mormon, and also known for The Wire). Their three characters feel like an ensemble of which Levee is clearly a contemptuous outsider. Boseman dominates every scene with his three ageing bandmates; bobbing and weaving amongst them and firing off barbed verbal jabs. The 43-year-old Boseman died during post-production on Ma Rainey, making this his final appearance in a movie. The film is dedicated to his memory, and well worth seeing for his electrifying performance. But the picture is overshadowed not only by the tragedy of Boseman's untimely death but by several other factors.

Regardless of who plays the titular character in any production, she is never meant to be an accurate representation of the real woman. This is not a docudrama. It is a meditation on the experience of a people, not a person. But Wolfe chooses to end his film like practically every contemporary biopic, with a photograph of the actual person. Catching a glimpse of that one still image of the real Ma Rainey undercuts everything the movie has just shown us. Staring at the black and white image of the blues legend, her head cocked to the side with an open mouth smile revealing her crooked but not Gold-capped teeth, makes us wonder: who was this woman? what was she like? was she anything like Viola Davis? The photograph seems utterly out of alignment with the film we’ve just seen.

Revered costume designer Ann Roth and a crack make-up team do a magnificent job adding size and heft to Davis while also providing elegant period details. But Davis never disappears into this costume. Instead, she wields it like a prominent prop. As magnificent an actress as she is, Davis has never possessed the ability to transform Streep-like into different personas. Some stage productions of Ma Rainey feature a big star in the title role, like Whoopi Goldberg in the 2003 Broadway revival, but it’s too bad a film version couldn’t have been a showcase for a lesser-known actress (perhaps one who can even sing). Though it’s difficult to imagine the film getting made without a star of Davis’s calibre.

Wolfe’s pedestrian visual style offers little help to his leading lady. The entire picture is shot like a generic HBO movie, bereft of any distinctive visual choices. The way Wolfe and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler (known for his work on Peter Berg’s films) choose to capture the action and setting we might as well be watching a live recording of a stage show. The constantly roaming camera seems unsure what to focus on until it inevitably settles into uninspired close-ups that underline each key moment. This lack of wide shots strip the performances of nuance and go a long way towards rendering the characters as one-note caricatures rather than the multilayered representations of specific types of folks existing in a specific era, as is captured by any decent stage production.

Worse, every time we leave the confines of the two-story building in which the action of the play unfolds, we enter the same generic and artificial, digitally created virtual backdrop we see in all period pieces nowadays. So even if Davis were able to transform into an exciting and unknown character, every time she steps out into the street she’d look like a cartoon since the bustling, brightly colored cityscape that exists outside the recording studio has more in common with a Pixar movie than with 1920s Chicago.

The goal of bringing August Wilson to more people and creating versions of his plays that can last for generations is noble, but I hope Washington and the others tasked with transferring his work from stage to screen can figure out ways to do it that transcend the “slightly opened up filmed play” aesthetic found in these first two movie adaptations.