Your heart breaks a little when Chadwick Boseman’s recklessly ambitious jazz trumpeter Levee insists fiercely to his bandmates in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: “I got my time coming to me...” Taken 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:from us far too soon, the lat🤡e actor brings an astonishing, electrifying energy to his final performa𝐆nce.
He’s the dynamo firing up💦 this punchy screen adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play about the exploitation of 1920s sinꦓging legend Ma Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, and her long-suffering band. It’s a worthy capper to Boseman’s career, another role that brings Black history in from the margins, like Marshall (2017) or the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 (2013).
Largely confined to a white-owned Chicago recording studio in an against-the-clock session that Ma (a magisterial Viola Davis) constantly thr♔eatens to scupper, the film makes a virtue of the play’s claustrophobia, using the shut-in♚ space as a tense emotional battleground.
Director George C. Wolfe (a Broadway veteran who created Jelly’s Last Jam) attempts to fend off the stagey, talky feel by keeping his camera restlessly mobile, a strategy that’s mostl🌊y successful. The camera prowls, slinks and ducks around the bickering band, as Levee fights for his new swinging jazz sound while Ma battles for respect for herself, and her beloved soul-soothing ‘blues’. Gold and ochre visuals point up both the fierce heat and rush of Chicago streets (where the magnificently gowned Ma and her boys are just a Southern “jug band”) and the sharp shadows of the stifling studio.
Wolfe also enlists the session’s relentless tick-tock time pressure to push this lean, tight movie on relentlessly, as the stammering voice intros of rookie Sylvester (Dusan Brown) create a comic pile of wrecked vinyl, and Levee makes a rash lig🌃htning move on Ma’s bored girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Page). Bringing the rage from the stage (with a dynamism that escaped producer Denzel Washington’s powerful but over-respectful Fences), the band members’ argumentative storytelling is filled with heartfelt Black struggle. Rape, revenge, racist attacks 🍬and near-lynchings are unrolled, a grim Black Lives Matter topicality giving them unsettling resonance nearly a century after the film’s setting.
But the film is swept along by its two potent central performances, Davis generꦓating hefty diva-power with her proud, obstinate, blues-preaching Ma, determined not to be reduced to a ripped-off voice. Boseman’s wiry, angry Levee brings the film’s real charge however, giving every rippling horn improv, fierce God-taunting rant, and soft-shoe shuffle the urgency of a man racing to make his mark with his art. The desperate, eloquent force of his performance gives this muscular film added punch and poignancy.
