Poignant coda to a promising career cut tragically short
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
15 cert, 94 min
Dir George C Wolfe
Starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, Michael Potts, Taylour Paige, Dusan Brown, Jeremy Shamos, Jonny Coyne
When Chadwick Boseman died in August at the age of 43, we’d seen almost everything he’d managed to accomplish – but only a fraction, it felt, of what he could do. This prodigiously talented actor left one more role in the cutting room: the raffish, quick-tempered trumpeter Levee in this Netflix adaptation of an August Wilson play, directed by George C Wolfe.
Whether or not Boseman knew it would be his last performance while giving it is moot. It is unquestionably his finest, crackling with passion, intelligence and anger (righteous and otherwise), and delivered with an eyeball-magnetising feline grace.
What’s more, it feels anything but final. Watching Boseman here is less like witnessing the end of a career than glimpsing the glorious parts of it that never came to pass. Like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire –a formidable comparison, but by no means an unwarranted one – his brilliance is inseparable from his promise.
In that respect, at least, Levee himself is something of a kindred spirit. This gifted and ambitious young musician is one quarter of the backing band employed by Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), the southern singer known as the Mother of the Blues.
We’re in Chicago in the summer of 1927, where the temperature has reached temper-fraying levels. Ma has come to town to cut a record, including the raunchy signature number from which the film’s title is derived. In consultation with the label’s (white) owner (Jeremy Shamos), Levee has come up with a snappy new arrangement which he says could transform the song into a popular hit.
But his older, more experienced bandmates – Colman Domingo’s Cutler on trombone, Michael Potts’s Slow Drag on bass, Glynn Turman’s Toledo on keys – aren’t convinced the redoubtable Ma will roll over for this skinny, shiny-shoed little upstart, when she eventually deigns to arrive.
Despite the film’s theatrical roots, the performances – even at their most intense and soaring – have been perfectly calibrated for the screen, targeting the camera rather than the back row of the stalls. And this even goes for Davis’s swaggering, imperious Ma, with her war-paint-like make-up and bountifully upholstered physique. Inside and outside the studio, in 1927 and arguably also now, the problem remains unchanged. How can a black American possibly thrive in a system that was built to treat them as a commodity, rather than individuals with their own dreams and drives?
For Ma, the answer is to make hay when the sun shines, and enjoy making the men who’ll get rich from her music fetch her a cold Coca-cola, or acquiesce to other diva demands. But Levee’s ambitions are greater – and shaped d by a horrifying childhood
experience which Boseman lays bare in an extraordinary monologue that sends an electric current coursing through the hairs on your hands. Rather than working for the system, he wants to make it work for him, but the system has other ideas.
A course has been set for a collision – and at the moment it approaches, I found myself yelling “NO!” at the screen, like a Frenchman in 1895 shouting about the locomotive heading for the crowd. This is chamber-piece cinema that hits with steam-train force.
Showing in selected cinemas from Dec 4 and on Netflix from Dec 18