The good, the bad, and a movie review

First the good. I feel substantially better. The antibiotic is working, the life force is returning to my body, and I feel better than I’ve felt since late September. 

This photo from my neighborhood walk is the bad. Post-Covid19: failed businesses boarded up and graffiti’d, soaring unemployment, increasing numbers of houseless people. I waited for someone to walk into the shot, but nobody came, not even a dog-walker; many streets are deserted. 

“RIP Black Panther” refers to Chadwick Boseman, who was the star of both Black Panther and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. He died of colon cancer soon after finishing the latter, and what a loss that is! If they had called the movie Ma Rainey’s Band, and she wasn’t in it, I would have loved it. It’s about the men in Ma Rainey’s band, and as a vehicle for Black men’s stories about Black people’s suffering and the injustices of racism in the USA, the film is vivid and important. It matters for those stories to be told and heard, and they gut-punch the viewer with their truth.

But the movie is not about Ma Rainey, and that’s why I’m disappointed. I hope one day someone like Ava Duvernay will do justice to Ma Rainey, and if that happens, maybe Viola Davis will play her. Davis loves Ma Rainey and infuses her with a rock-solid sense of worth. But Davis isn’t on screen as much as the band is, and when she is onstage, she’s undercut by the film’s director. She has one really great scene with the band leader, but mostly she’s absent. We hear from the band more than we hear from her; by the end of the film we know the band, but we still don’t know her. Boseman’s Levee changes and develops; Davis’s Ma Rainey doesn’t.

George C. Wolfe, the director of the film, has not been kind to women in his work, and this film is no exception. Wolfe, through his use of editing, makeup, and costume, dooms Ma Rainey to fail in competition with the trumpet-player, Levee (Boseman). Ma Rainey attempts (and fails) to keep her pretty young girlfriend from the sexy, appealing (and clean) young man at the heart of the action. Rainey’s eye makeup is smudged as if she hasn’t washed her face in three days, and her skin glistens with oil and sweat. Levee is clean-cut, handsome, elegant. Levee loves his dapper high yellow wing-tip shoes; Ma Rainey slops around in house slippers, and that’s the critical metaphor. Viola Davis upholds Rainey’s dignity despite the direction. Watch the movie, because it’s important, but don’t fall for Wolfe’s lesbian-bashing depiction of Ma Rainey. If you feel a vague repulsion at the idea of Ma Rainey bullying and threatening a girl half her age, remember that’s a fiction created by the director through casting, editing, costume, and lighting. The fact that we have some sympathy for her at the end is a testament to Davis.