MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM (2020) FILM REVIEW

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15, 93 Mins

Will Chadwick get his posthumous Oscar?

All eyes will be on 2021’s Oscar season (if there even is one) and specifically on George C. Wolfe’s new film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’. Not just because it feels very contemporary with its themes of race, art, religion and the historic exploitation of Black recording artists by White producers echoing loud and clear in the #BlackLivesMatter era. But also because it’s the final screen appearance of the late Chadwick Boseman who died of colon cancer back in August.

Many people have tipped Boseman to pick up a posthumous Oscar for his performance as Levee Green, a 1920s trumpeter. The last time a leading actor did this was when Heath Ledger picked up Best Supporting Actor for his extraordinary portrayal of the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008) back in 2009.

‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ is set over a series of hours in an afternoon recording session in 1920s Chicago. A band of musicians are waiting for the legendary Ma Rainey (played with a booming baritone by Viola Davis) (“Mother of the Blues”). Late to her session, the boisterous Ma engages in a wits battle with her white manager and producer over who gets credit for her music. 

The band waiting in the claustrophobic, tight-spaced rehearsal room, cocky trumpeter Levee (Boseman), who has a crush on Ma’s young girlfriend Dussie (Taylour Paige), verbally spars off his fellow musicians with stories, truths and lies that could well change the course of their lives. Levee simultaneously has ambitions of starting his own band and thus finds himself soliciting the managers and producers and reliving previous traumas.

No one wants to write ill of the dead and the odds over Boseman picking up a Best Supporting Actor or even Best Actor are certainly in Boseman’s favour. He’s fantastic here as Levee, flexing his bare teeth, tensing his skinny torso and blinking his tiny eyes. Boseman’s best clip reel moment comes early on during a one-man speech he gives to fellow musicians: “My mama was frying up some chicken when them mans come in the house...Must have been eight or nine of ‘em...She’s standing there frying that chicken when them mans come and took a hold of her just like you take a hold of a mule and make it do what you want...There was my mama... with a gang of white mans”.

Those are strong, powerful words that resonate in a world where racially motivated violence continues to be an urgent issue…

Boseman isn’t the star of the show, though. That’s Viola Davis who has such a big and bombastic presence as the titular Ma Rainey. I loved her opening song - ‘Deep Moaning Blues’ - especially when it was accompanied by archive footage, photographs and newspaper headlines about Black Southerners invited to travel north for work. Davis is also the only person who can make glugging down a bottle of coke sexy AF.

This version of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ is produced by Denzel Washington who last headlined another Wilson adaptation back in 2017 with ‘Fences’. Like that film, ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ makes Wilson and theatrical settings cinematic and the locations look every bit as big and beautiful on a small TV screen as they would at the cinema.

This film achieves cinematic flourish through the power of words and camera angles such as when Boseman gives a soliloquy about bad luck or when the camera spins 360 degrees around him threatening Glynn Turman’s Toledo with a knife or when Ma Rainey glugs down her bottle of Coca-Cola. Or the close-up shots of a microphone speaker before Ma Rainey gives her big performance.

There’s a lot of use of the “n” word. An offensive term of which usage has often been up for debate. While it is generally and rightfully seen as completely unacceptable for White people to use it to describe Black people, some Black people use it as a term of endearment amongst each other; taking the sting out of the slur and “reclaiming” it. Whenever Boseman uses it here, he is merely finding mockery in the offence.

Overall, I really enjoyed ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’. It’s a contemporary and cinematic update of a classic with very real issues at its heart and two outstanding performances from Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis. I hope Chadwick gets his posthumous Oscar, but Viola needs one too…

‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ is on Netflix now.
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