Peter Viney's Blog

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Netflix
2020

Directed by George C. Wolfe
Screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Based on the stage play by August Wilson
Produced by Denzel Washington

CAST
Viola Davis- Ma Rainey
Chadwick Boseman- Levee, trumpet player
Colman Domingo- Cutler, trombone player
Gynn Turman – Toledo, piano player
Michael Potts – Slow Drag, double bass player
Jeremy Shamos- Irvin, Ma’s manager
Jonny Coyne – Sturdyvant, recording studio owner
Taylour Page – Dussie Mae, Ma’s girl friend
Dusan Brown – Sylvester, Ma’s nephew and driver

This is like previous years, two reviews in two days as on our theatre trips. Netflix and Amazon Prime are rolling them out for Christmas and for the Oscar season. This had three weeks in ‘theatres.’ Where? Who knows? This one looks a certainty for nomination for Best Actress for Viola Davis, and best actor for Chadwick Boseman, who died at 43 after making the film. Both are fully deserved.

It’s not a biopic of Ma Rainey, so much as a snapshot on one brief era in 1927. Ma Rainey was said to have been the inventor of the word “blues” (or so she claimed). Her real name was Getrude Pridgett, and it would change the world of music to think of the first female blues singer to be recorded as Gertie Pridgett. The real Ma Rainey’s story is so good that it’s begging for a film of her whole life. She started with gospel, worked minstrel shows, and for fans of The Band’s W.S. Walcott’s Medicine Show, she worked for F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels (whose name inspired Robbie Robertson). She was alleged to have kidnapped Bessie Smith (Bessie Smith is another song by The Band) and taught her to sing the blues.

For a third link to The Band, the film starts with her hugely raunchy stage show in a tent (You know he always holds it in a tent … W.S. Walcott’s Medicine Show), with a team of writhing scantily-clad dancers, rather like a Southern states Midnight Ramble, after a carnival ended. In 1925 she was arrested for her part in a ‘lesbian orgy,’ and was romantically linked to Bessie Smith.

I was impressed by the cinematography and use of colour … it’s like a sepia postcard from the era. It starts in Georgia in 1927, the real Ma Rainey’s stamping ground.

Then the film treks up to a seedy bare recording studio in Chicago where they’re trying to capture her sound. The interiors are intense, all yellows and browns, then after the action, an inevitable coda in washed out colour as a much larger white band rip-off one of the blues songs. The ‘white bread’ version.

No plot spoilers on the events … though it is a very well-known stage play. We failed to get in to the highly-acclaimed National Theatre’s 2016 run. August Wilson wrote it in 1982, and Denzel Washington has the rights to film August Wilson’s plays. He produced this one, and starred in Fences alongside Viola Davis in 2016. I reviewed the 2013 stage production of Fences starring Lenny Henry here (LINK).

The issue with the film of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is that in spite of topping and tailing with Georgia sequences (with her sexy onstage dance troupe) and the white big band recording, it remains essentially a filmed stage play.

OK, there are scenes outside with the car, they get into the alley and the air shaft, they use multiple rooms in the studio … but it comes down to a great deal of highly impassioned dialogue in one room, plus some significant ‘reported’ incidents. It is a classic American stage play (right down to the requisite two star roles towering over everyone else). As I said of Fences, it might date from the 1980s, but could just have easily have been written in the 1940s or 1950s. Theatrically, it’s highly conventional as a play. Does that make a good film? Well, in 2020 I have had to get used to substituting streamed stage plays for live stage plays, and it is never the same. Essentially, film does not need, nor allow for, such long and wordy interchanges.

Where Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom wins over Fences for me is the base storyline … studios exploiting black musicians, and the interest in recording the actual songs. The small four piece … no drummer … gets that 1927 feel. Getting her favourite nephew Sylvester to do the intro to Black Bottom s a sequence to savour.

The play has three groups … Ma Rainey and her acolytes, Sylvester and Dussie Mae, the white manager in league with the recording studio owner, then the four piece backing band. Ma Rainey is an archetype African-American band leader / singer. Powerful, oozing charisma, but also remote, almost contemptuous of lesser mortals. The expression in her eyes while singing reminded me so much of watching Muddy Waters singing from just six feet away.

She will hire and fire at will … in the end Levee goes too far, playing too many notes, distracting from what she’s doing. It’s how Jimi Hendrix got sacked by Little Richard after all. James Brown’s musicians would testify to much the same imperial behaviour.

Levee embodies the Staggerlee myth, as described by Greil Marcus in Mystery Train, who applies it to Sly Stone:

Greil Marcus: It is a story that Black America has never tired of hearing, and never stopped living out, like Whites with their Westerns. Locked in the images of a thousand versions of the tale, it is an archetype that speaks to fantasies of casual violence and violent sex, lust and hatred, ease and mastery, a fantasy of style and steppin’ high. At a deeper level, it is a fantasy of no limits for people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. It is both a portrait of that tough and vital character that everyone would like to be, and just another pointless, tawdry dance of death.

Phew! Greil summed up Levee and the plot there, and first did so back in 1975. It isn’t exclusively African-American either … Marcus mentions The Whites and their Westerns, and remember Johnny Cash’s I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die (Folsom Prison Blues) which is pure Staggerlee.

Levee has the sharp shoes … don’t step on my yellow leather shoes. He’s creative, ambitious, volatile and he’s a hoochie coochie man with women, and a rolling stone (thank you, Muddy Waters). Get on the wrong side? It’s your funeral and my trial (thank you Sonny Boy Williamson). He wants to write songs, get a young new band around him … he despises the ‘jug band music’ of Ma Rainey’s band. He has edges of Sly Stone, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix.

The film captures how much time for musicians (and actors) is spent in just waiting around to be told to start the action. Cutler is the accredited ‘band leader’ and religious, can’t take Levee’s railing against God. Toledo, the piano player, is older. He wants a peaceful life. Slow Drag, the bass player keeps out of it to one side (John Entwhistle, Bill Wyman!). $25 each for the session? $200 for Ma Rainey? I doubt they were that generous in 1927.

If Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis get their Academy Awards, they earned them. It is a powerful piece, and relatively short at 90 minutes. I still think the natural medium for this story, confined as it is to mainly one room, on one day, is theatre.