I had unfinished business with the play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson. I had intended to see Howard Davies’s RNT production in late 1989…in fact I think I might even have got tickets and then had to give them up when I chose, instead, to visit the USA that autumn:
So I was very keen to see this movie when I read about it’s impending launch on Netflix in mid December 2020.
Kim had very kindly bought Janie a 6-month trial Netflix package earlier in the lockdown, which Janie switched on in order to see the mini-series around which Kim had designed her gift. After that, our usual reluctance to watch TV had switched in, so we had watched precisely nothing more on Netflix for just shy of six months.
So I knew we only had a few days left to watch this movie on our prepaid package before…horror of horrors…we might have had to actually pay to watch the thing, having not used our trial package for five-and-a-half months.
Anyway…
…watch it we did and extremely impressed with the performances I was.
Here is a link to the IMDb resources on this movie.
All of the performances were very good indeed, but in particular Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis were truly excellent.
Here is the official trailer for the movie:
In truth, it is a somewhat melodramatic play but it holds the attention because it shows an extraordinary moment in the history of music, plus the history of race and gender struggles in the USA, through the lens of a genuine early recording star in decline (Ma Rainey) and a fictional trumpeter whose direct experience of prejudice, racial violence and abuse set him on a tragic path.
Central to the play is the recording of Ma Rainey’s signature song, which you can hear here:
In short, I thought it was a superb movie and well worth seeing. Janie found the accents hard to follow and found the plot a bit basic, but did agree with me that we were watching outstanding performances, beautifully filmed.
Recommended.