‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: Great Acting Can’t Transcend Theatrical Origins
Since the onset of the pandemic, Netflix has made a serious push to bring prestige films onto their platform and make them available for home viewing, even going so far as to poach them from other distributors. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is likely to be the subject of a heavy awards push and, despite checking all the boxes, is held back by its essential nature as a stage play.
Based on a play by the same name from August Wilson, America’s foremost black playwright of the 20th Century, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” feels constrained by its stage origins. The film is driven by dialogue. Nothing really happens, but people talk about things happening. A lot. They talk endlessly. Someone dies, but in the most “theater” way possible. Most of the action is confined to a single location and scenes transition from group dialogues, to dramatic monologues, to act breaks, and back again mechanically. Much of what is said is profoundly and alarmingly true about the black experience and about the life of an artist, but it can feel over the top, on the nose, and delivered by characters who feel more like metaphors than people. I can see all of this working brilliantly on the stage, and it’s easy to see why August Wilson is so highly regarded. However the experience of the stage is inherently anti-cinematic and translates poorly to the screen. Many an acclaimed play has been adapted to the screen with varied success, and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” exemplifies much of what doesn’t work about these adaptations. Directed by award winning theater director George C. Wolfe, the film is perhaps too respectful of its theatrical inspiration, going for the standard camera techniques (long takes, whirling dolly shots, privilege of dialogue over everything) that have become a staple of adaptations of stage plays. This stands in contrast to something like Moonlight, where Barry Jenkins was able to take a potentially dull project and turn it into something electrifying.
The cinematography, sound, music, and editing, are all reasonably well done but do not stand out strongly. Every shot in the film is given a bright, soft glow with blown out highlights that has become the modern shorthand for the past. Think Baz Luhrman’s “The Great Gatsby”. It works well enough, but given the fact that the story hardly leaves one location, doesn’t have much opportunity to shine.
As with all stage plays, the focus becomes performance. Plays live and die by their actors and so does “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. All the performers do a very good job, especially Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. They bring their characters to life excellently as written, and would likely win Tonys if this was on the stage. However on film, the theatricality of their performances can become a little too much during the emotional peaks of the story. Emotions on the stage are big, bold, and over the top because they have to be communicated in a way that someone sitting way in the back of a theater will understand them. However for film, which is up close and personal, these actions must be appropriately scaled down less they become abrasive.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” sends a very strong message about the black experience, but in this case, the medium is also the message, and that message is stage plays, even great ones, generally make for lousy movies. It does a lot of things well, especially the acting, but is still pretty damn boring.
