Ma Rainey and Chadwick Boseman’s final role

19 March, 2021

After the success of Fences, Denzel Washington’s 2016 film, where he starred together with Viola Davis, it was just a matter of time until a new major adaptation of August Wilson’s works (more precisely, one based on one of the ten theater plays that compose the Pittsburgh Cycle, which explores the African-American experience of life in the past century) would see the light of day. I’m referring to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which was released on Netflix towards the end of 2020 and was nominated for five Oscars at the beginning of this week, including two nominations for the actors performing the lead roles: one for Chadwick Boseman, who is the leading contender in his category, and Viola Davis, which makes her the most-nominated actress of color in history. George C. Wolfe’s film presents the jazz era from a perspective that is not white, one that was used to the point of exhaustion in numerous features, from The Great Gatsby to The Cotton Club, by placing a historical figure in the center of a fictitious story to illustrate the exploitation of black artists by white producers in those years.

It’s July 1927, and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (Davis), who is dubbed “The Mother of Blues” due to her influence on following generations, is summoned at a studio in Chicago to record some of her most well-known tunes, which are loved by all those who attend her concerts. The two white men present in the studio, Ivan (Jeremy Shamos), her manager, and producer Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), are agitated: will Ma show up for the sessions, and if so, when? Her backing band, led by trumpet player Levee (Boseman), arrives at the studio long before the songstress and is trying to rehearse in the building’s dank basement while waiting for her arrival. However, each attempt is interrupted by disagreements over the musical arrangement of “Black Bottom”, one of the songs that they’re set to record. Will it be the original, slower version of the tune, or will it be Levee’s rhythmical variant, which he trusts will open the doors to him acquiring his own band, one day? Sturdyvant, the owner of the studio, prefers the latter version since it caters better to the taste of the white jazz audience, the one which he is courting. The others, however, are not that convinced, but in the end, it’s not up to Levee and Sturdyvant, but to Ma.

Her image as a diva, which is suggested by the fretting of the two men, is set in stone from her very first appearance outside the scene. Holding the arms of her lover and her nephew, her hair curled in accordance to the day’s latest fashions and her eyes surrounded by make-up, she turns all heads as she enters and leaves the lobby of her hotel. The same happens with the authority which her colleagues seem to invest her with: when her nephew, who also works as a driver, causes an accident on their way to the studio, Ma doesn’t let herself be intimidated, although surrounded by a mob of angry men who gather at the site of the incident, and she confronts the policeman who is trying to take her at the nearest station to clarify things. Davis, who won an Oscar for her lauded performance in Fences, is unrecognizable as Ma Rainey, into whom she seems to have fully morphed. Beyond the usage of make-up and costumes, she displays a defiant expression and posture, which she uses to dominate those around her and to let them know that she won’t take any jokes. Given Ma’s reputation, who used her fame and success as a way to defend her personal beliefs, and one of her songs even ended up influencing the second wave of feminism, Davis instills her character with a sort of self-confidence that is tangible in every single second that she appears onscreen.

However, Levee’s introduction isn’t as memorable as Ma’s, but the unexpected death of the actor, known for performing the character of Black Panther in the eponymous Marvel film, is more than enough to give his appearance a strong impact. The self-confidence which characterizes his previous characters (such as T’Challa or Jackie Robinson) is replaced here with doubt and tension. Levee constantly feels like he has something to prove to the world which he is trying to conquer, and his uncertainty is visible in his eyes from the very start, as he is seen spending a week’s worth of his salary on a pair of shoes. And although the titular character is Ma, Levee is constantly trying to steal the film from her. He wants to replace her at any given step: he wants to lead those around him according to his whims and to become important enough to choose his musical arrangements for himself. Boseman, just as Davis, is fully in his element as if he had been born for this very role.

The differences between the two characters start to surface when we observe their ways of relating to society. “They don’t care about me at all. They only want my voice”, says Ma as a justification of her refusal to sing, that is, not until Irvin brings her a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. It’s the moment in which an attitude that initially comes across as spoiled gains new dimensions. The fake arrogance espoused by Ma is actually a shield for the little respect that she is given as a woman of color and a bisexual that has come out to the public, in 1920s Illinois. She’s aware of the fact that even her own manager is only using her for money, and so she uses every single shot that she has to defend her territory. Not only does she refuse to sing if even the smallest of her requests is not fulfilled, but she also stays faithful to her roots, sticking to her version of “Black Bottom”. Even more so, she’s fighting for the enfranchisement of her people and for their voices to be heard, at one point literally so, when she exasperates the entire crew by stubbornly insisting for her stuttering nephew to record his opening lines without making any mistakes.

Instead, Levee is looking down on the kind of music that he is singing at the moment and wants to make “true music”, that is, music for white people, as Sturdyvant implies to him. In the same song where Ma sees her sole chance of taking charge over her own career, Levee sees an opportunity for success in a racist society that has orphaned him. His bandmates criticize him for his attempt at pleasing those who do little more than to exploit him, but Levee is so traumatized by the killing of his loved ones that he sees no problem in it.

With its plot taking place almost exclusively in the recording studio’s two rooms, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom cannot shake the roots of the play on which it’s based. Wolfe, who is also a highly praised theater director, manages to find a balance between the mise-en-scene and the camera’s movements to avoid a flat film, but the literary monologues and, at times, the artificiality (and not the lack of subtlety) of the set pieces give a pervasive sensation of watching a recorded play. Aside from an intro that brings old photographs to life, Wolfe doesn’t put in much effort for his film to appear as cinematic. Not that the events on screen wouldn’t still work, even so, when his characters step outside, Tobias A. Schliesser’s camera elicits curiosity for the bustle and the energy of the streets, which is hardly equaled in the interior scenes – where the plot resonates mostly due to the relevance of the play, which regards a period in time when slavery was still a fresh wound, and which extends to this very day.



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Co-programmer of TIFF and BIDFF. Slightly obsessed with Billy Wilder and Paul Thomas Anderson. When he's not watching films and TV or spends his time on Letterboxd, he dreams of his own scripts.