Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020)

It must be said, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is more of a filmed play than a movie. Denzel Washington did a much better job adapting Fences into a reasonably cinematic object. Wolfe, a veteran theater director who has also helmed a number of films, doesn't seem to have a great deal of interest in making a cinematic adaptation of August Wilson. Instead, he's betting everything on Wilson's play and a remarkable cast. The fact that Ma Rainey 2020 works as well as it does is almost entirely attributable to Viola Davis, Glynn Turman, and the late Chadwick Boseman.

Ma Rainey is a critical / theoretical play in many respects. As a work of literature it is remarkably overt in its articulation of themes. First and foremost, this is a consideration of a transitional moment in American popular culture, when Black art like jazz and the blues can be commodified both by and for white audiences. Ma Rainey (Viola), as the "Mother of the Blues," is a Mack truck of a personality, although one gets the sense that her aggression and entitlement are just the tools she's acquired for negotiating a white world that she knows doesn't care about her. As we see in her gentle treatment of her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown), Ma can be generous of spirit. Her pushiness is tinged with sorrow and exhaustion, a sign that she has had to fight for every scrap she's attained.

This is contrasted with the tragedy of Levee (Boseman), a young man born in the blood of his parents' murders. Wilson depicts Levee as a man riven by double consciousness, fully aware that white men are dangerous and duplicitous, but still unable to divest himself of the dream of meritocracy. He's talented, and he can't quite fathom that this isn't going to be enough. Ma Rainey also leaves the question of gender implicit, but it's very much there. White people may not like Ma, but they nevertheless believe they can handle her. As a woman, she can only pose so much threat. Levee, as a man, is perceived as a more difficult commodity, and studio-head Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne) is careful to neutralize him.

Wilson delineates all this with a fair dose of abstraction. Ma, Levee, and especially Toledo (Turman) lay out the play's content in highly theatrical soliloquies that don't really translate very well to cinema / TV. With this in mind, Wolfe might've chosen a different approach. His adaptation is virtually a bottle episode, with almost all of the action happening in the recording studio's two main rooms. This apparent commitment to realism actually undercuts our belief in the world we're witnessing. A better film would have taken this into account and taken control of this derealizing effect. Still, the raw power of Boseman's performance -- sadly his last -- is enough to secure Ma Rainey's place in the annals.