Flamboyance is thematic in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a play-turned-film by Netflix plus co-producers Denzel Washington, Dany Wolf, and Todd Black. Though flamboyance has a ceiling, burned by the smoldering Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and trumpeteer Levee (Chadwick Boseman), the flotsam falling over them. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" is attractively straightforward in its 94-minute longevity, chronicling an afternoon plotted for recording with the titular Mother of Blues and the back-up band.
Davis acts it out stupendously. Her physical articulations are a sharpened sword, slicing in the slightest. Ma Rainey is consistently angry while Davis leashes her to be solemnly hectic. As the band awaits the blues legend, them and Levee discourse and unearth their personal arcs. The studio's rehearsal room is claustrophobic, disrupting the band's sense of space and restfulness acclimated by the annoying torrid air. Ma Rainey shows — George C. Wolfe directs her entrance in a tracking shot that circles. The director's locomotive capture uncoils the imposing size of Ma Rainey's lounge and the approach-reluctance around her. The afternoon heat is the forecast of her inner temperature which the formidable songstress translates to hypnotic vocalization. Talented a singer but demanding a performer, Ma Rainey is the scalding humidity. Her heat torches the recording session, the studio, and the team in it. A desert haze she becomes peppering the band and the music producers with scratching grains. She is uneasy in the quiet, and that is her signal for belting out the soul-filling blues.
Athletic is "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," accelerated by Andrew Mondshein's editing and paced by the always-tapping screenplay of Ruben Santiago-Hudson (the movie is based on the play by August Wilson). The editing causes tsunami-ish reaction, tossing and flipping the viewer in a concert of one track that is only being recorded: commencing and commencing as if the stutters of Sylvester (Dusan Brown) — Ma Rainey's nephew. Knowingly, the film will run through, sticking viewership like parched sweat and Coca-Cola. Closed and musty, the rehearsal room challenges the ethical stability of the band which composes of Toledo (Glynn Turman), pianist; Slow Drag (Michael Potts), playing the bass; Cutler (Colman Domingo), on trombone and guitar; and Levee the horn player. They are all black musicians working with two white studio executives: inordinate Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), who is also Ma Rainey’s manager, and assertive Mel Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne). Cabin-like, the production design rightly imitates the depressingly wretched place: walls tanning, the bulb hardly functioning. This box is a hungry hibernating animal about to devour the musicians. Throughout, they discuss then argue cyclically as the screenplay dapples on the nihilist and biblical: “Life ain’t shit.” “Death got style.” “God no pay no niggas no mind.” “Come on, turn your back on me;" the last verse being a declaration of Levee as he cracks into his duality inside the increasingly small cabin with the others. He demands God confront him by renouncing him, being both believer and blaspheme, a tenuous spiritual wrestling.
Boseman as the trumpeteer blows the stage with his unapologetic swag and head-turning mug churns. His physical whips are so measured that there is a specific personification in the dances. For this film, he lashes out with an accent, or non-accent because it is very naturally distinctive in dramatic vebalization. Boseman's diction is of a twang of the guitar and the ticklish draft of the trumpet. Surely, he must be this era's lord of movie accents, adding to his Wakandan tongue which he invented as fabled. Boseman is multi-vocal as much as he is multi-charactered. In the rehearsal room, Levee erupts, spewing his backstory. Instead of a flashback, he orates it. The painful recall materializes in the twinkle in his leer: pearls of early occurrences smithed into the trumpet he exhales with. He dares steal the spotlight of Ma Rainey, and he very well can as Boseman should have locked a posthumous Academy Award nomination for this soulful depiction of the enterprising horn player. He woos the blues legend's girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige). She just wants to wiggle around, but in the studio, there is not much freedom to wiggle about. So she is absorbed by Levee's lure.
The costumes in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" are era-centric, defining the eminence of 1920's street and show business glam. My, oh my, those blonde wingtip brogues are the motif of the period, richly aged with popping gradient swathe in retro tangerine, flourishing the surrealness of backtracking and pining for. The makeup is imagination and vintage revisited, drying on the characters's skins as though colorized photographs — retouched with proper dab — from the decade. Said photos are actually used for transitional narration; blues culture integrated with Black culture in a humid hue. There are pictures of Black laborers to establish the societal stature of the late 1920's: the colored faces occupied Chicago's monotonous streets. Blues, not to be confused with jazz, is clarified in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by amping the volume on its culture. While jazz shape-shifts evermore, blues is more tight-knit as its performers practice and play as a unit, thus the oppressive rehearsal box. Amid Levee insisting on playing the arrangement he wrote of Ma Rainey's song, the band is adamant on practicing the version inclusively, cinematically describing arrangement as synthesis in blues. It just ups the tensions of the musicians mercurially as Levee, fidgety, tries to pry loose a shut door at the end of the room. When he forces through, he stumbles into an even narrower cubicle mirroring a cell he will not exit. There is no way out but through the studio, to play and record. The same door entered is the only door to self-freedom that resounds louder in a tinier chamber. Or the cabin will suffocate conscience into dwindling baritone.
Director: George C. Wolfe
Images and trailer ©️ Netflix, Escape Artists, Mundy Lane Entertainment; YouTube.com
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