MA RAINEY’S NETFLIX DEBUT

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (published Jamburi Day December 12, 2020)

In just a week’s time, the long-awaited movie, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ comes out on Netflix for all of us quarantined folks to enjoy. It’s long-awaited for several reasons. For one, it’s the last film made by the award-winning iconic (Black Panther) actor Chatwick Boseman to appear in before his untimely death last August. In ‘Ma Rainey’, Chatwick, playing Levee, a sassy young trumpet player, nearly takes away from the real star of the film, Viola Davis (‘How to get away with murder’) who leads in the title role.

What also makes the film so special is it’s the latest play-transformed-into-film, scripted by great African American playwright, the late August Wilson, whose ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’ charts the 20^th century of Black-Americans’ everyday lives in a decalogue of plays, one for every decade. What also makes Wilson’s Cycle so exceptional is that it tells ordinary people’s stories from a uniquely Black-American perspective. “They wholly ignore theatre’s dominant White gaze,’ explained one young female playwright who added that Wilson’s plays “liberated” Black writers and widened their vision of creative possibilities.

The other remarkable fact about ‘Ma Rainey’ -- apart from Viola Davis’ extraordinary make-over into a beautifully fat Blues singer who wore a ‘fat suit’ with pleasure, poise, dignity and a non-nonsense attitude that kept both her arrogant white manager and Levee, in line – is Denzel Washington’s role.

For while he and Viola both earned countless accolades for their Broadway performance in another one of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, ‘Fences’, following the play’s success, the playwright’s widow, Constanza Romero, asked Denzel, (now 65), to adapt all the Cycle plays to film. He agreed, and that is how he produced both ‘Fences’ (2016) and ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ (2019). (Next, we understand, he’ll produce Samuel L. Jackson and his own son, John David Washington in Wilson’s ‘The Piano Lesson’ which is set in the 1930s).

‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ is set in the 1920’s when Ma was among the first Blues singers to be recorded. Blues music had been around since the late 19^th century. It was born in the post-slavery South and is emotionally expressive of the melancholy and soul of the Black experience. The film takes place in a Chicago recording studio, up North where millions of Black people came to escape racist Jim Crow laws and hopefully find jobs in urban factories. 

Ma knows she essentially a ‘cash cow’ for the white music establishment, which is why she takes no nonsense from either her manager or her band. A big chunk of the film revolves around band members who are in the studio’s back room rehearsing and chattering, telling stories and hearing Levee’s dreams of reaching the top of the music game with what he calls his ‘new’ style of trumpeting. His arrogance is only matched by Ma’s and triggers a few volatile scenes made all the more remarkable knowing that Chatwick, like Wilson, will soon leave us, having suffered quietly with colon cancer.

The film has already earned Chatwick post-humous awards.