The spirit of the jazz-blues age together with breathtaking performances makes this a welcome holiday drama.
“Blues help you get out of bed in the morning.” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis)
Ma Rainey looks like she would get up on the wrong side of that bed, but she sure can sing the blues on either side. In Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982 play), Davis enacts another survivor, this one the opposite of her submissive wife to Denzel’s domineering husband in August Wilson’s Fences (1985 play).
Washington produces this Wilson play, and he casts another strong Black actor, Chadwick Bozeman, to play Ma’s feisty young horn player. Because Levee wants arrangements of their blues to be fleet with the spirit and pace of jazz, he gets the white promoters to back him, to little avail because Ma wants it her old way. Negotiating with the charismatic Ma or even playing music doesn’t happen until she gets her “ice-old” Coca Cola. Old school prevails even if Levee is right.
The natural tension between stasis and progress allows Bozeman to act half-crazed and inspired, a tour de force performance fitting for his last one before his death. Amazing is his acting range from a cool leader in Black Panther to a hothead in this drama. He has a minimum of two extended speeches, one almost five minutes about a disturbing crime he witnessed and his father’s revenge on the perpetrators. I challenge you to go to the fridge during these impassioned pleas for justice.
It’s not difficult to see Levee carrying on the angry legacy of his father in a world on the brink of massive racism as Blacks migrate to the North and its entrenched resistance. Ma’s players are constantly negotiating for payment from the white business manager and recording studio owner, both of whom are capitalists, not humanists.
As in Wilson’s Fences, the action takes place in only two spaces, here in a recording studio and in a basement practice room for a 1927 Chicago recording session. A brief foray onto the street brings more conflict, as if there weren’t enough inside.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is made for stage or film because the dialogue is electric and human. Sometimes the vernacular and rapid pace are challenging to understand; well, then, just rewind or use closed caption: “They hear it [blues]come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking.” (Ma)
Ma says it all about black/white conflict and the tensions of artistic creativity: “They gonna treat me the way I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt ‘em.” It’s tough out there, 1927 or 2020.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
