Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a drama adapated from the August Wilson play of the same name. It follows real life 'Mother Of The Blues' Ma Rainey(Viola Davis) during a recording session in 1920's Chicago. The film opens on various band members waiting for Ma to show up for the session and ambitious trumpter Levee(Chadwick Boseman) plans his own muscial career with an eye on Ma's girlfriend. The band tells stories and kills time before Ma comes into the studio like a force of nature.
Davis gives an absolutely electric and dominant performance as the legendary singer, authoritative and unyielding but just below the surface, behind her impenetrable armor of personality, you can see her insecurities and jealously. It's a remarkable powerhouse of a turn, coming from Davis who never fails to deliver, it's wonderful to see her go so big, so powerful. Boseman, in the final role of his career, is dangerously mercurial, not the stalwart hero we've seen him before, but complicated, questionable, ambitious but deeply scarred. It's a wide-ranging and compelling character, full of contradictions and manic rage. The limited supporting players build out the cast solidly but ultimately the film is a two hander even though Davis and Boseman barely share screentime they, and their inevitable conflict, are the stories sole focus.
A perfect soundtrack with some diegetic performances bring dimension and texture to the film, the costumes and sets perfectly create the historical context for the actors to shine, but if there is a flaw it is that of any stage play-to-film adaptation, it still feels very much like a play. At times it can be too sedentary, there are, in essence, only two locations. Characters monologue and we wait for a cut-to that never comes. The same was true of Fences and August Osage County, the filmmakers are too faithful to the source material so don't utilize fully the medium in which they're working. The film feels constrained in a way it doesn't have to be and as such some of the crescendo moments don't carry the same weight, in a theater on a stage the would sing, on film it can feel a bit odd.
Davis and Boseman soar above the minor adaptation issues and the story is brought to vivid and heartbreaking life.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
See It.
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