First things first. Chadwick Boseman gives a performance like nothing you've ever seen. The rest of the cast, led by the legend that is Viola Davis, is, as might be expected, tip-top, but Mr Boseman flies ever higher in every scene.
The film is based on a famous play by a great playwright who chose to write with a sense of melodrama that can still work in the theatre but somehow feels dated when transfered to the screen. The camera has to cope with the sheer size of performance necessary to capture set-piece speeches, which go against the grain of image-led cinema. Renowned Broadway director George C Wolfe gets the actors to the right temperature, but then has to find a way to make the project cinematic. The solutions here, apart from minimal opening out from the claustrophobia of the recording studio setting, are some mobile camera work and quite a bit of nimble editing. Curiously, though, these strategies simply emphasise the work's stage origins. What do work are the close-ups. They bring us closer to the characters than can ever happen on a stage. With an ensemble as fine as this one, the more close-ups the better.
So, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, like the film of Wilson's play FENCES, is not satisfying as a movie, but as a record of a powerful play. Both well worth seeing. MA RAINEY is the greater, because of Chadwick Boseman. What an amazing actor. What a loss. What a legacy.
