Tag: Tate Taylor

Black Actresses Are the Best Thing About ‘Get On Up’

I read film reviews, so I wasn’t expecting great art out of ‘Get On Up,’ but I also wasn’t expecting a film that frequently had me asking myself why it had been made. I know all the good reasons for making a James Brown bio-pic. He was a musical genius (I don’t use that word lightly) whose innovations, for a less talented (or less business-savvy) artist, would have led to a nice little corner of the avant-garde. Instead, Brown and his band produced chart-making hits for 30 years (in itself an unprecedented accomplishment: his career lasted for 50 years) that lured people onto the dance floor who sat out every other song (and his work is sampled in many other artists’ hits as well). He also had a dramatic personal life: he was in prison both before he was famous and after the peak of his fame had passed, had many children by many different women (some of whom he married, some he did not) and, through the years, had a slew of domestic violence charges filed against him. They, of course, were not the reason he went to prison.

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Awards season is here, which means overrated films like Boyhood and Ida are starting to collect lauds. And even those of us in groups that give out very minor awards are starting to receive “for your consideration” screeners. I saw a fun trailer for Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, at the Roxbury International Film Festival in the summer and then didn’t hear much about it until last month when I received in the mail a heavy promotional packet from its distributor, with a large, glossy, brightly colored book of stills from the film filled with big-font blurbs from critics and, hilariously, no sign of a DVD–or info about accessing the film online–inside. I was trying to think what the studio’s motivation was, that someone in their marketing department thought I would flip through the film’s book of photos and think, “This looks fabulous,” and immediately vote for it as “Best Picture.” The studio, Universal,  Fedexed the DVD to all of us later. Marketing for this film might have been better off with the strategy I had originally imagined.

I read film reviews, so I wasn’t expecting great art out of Get On Up,  but I also wasn’t expecting a film that frequently had me asking myself why it had been made. I know all the good reasons for making a James Brown bio-pic. He was a musical genius (I don’t use that word lightly) whose innovations, for a less talented (or less business-savvy) artist, would have led to a nice little corner of the avant-garde. Instead, Brown and his band produced chart-making hits for 30 years (in itself an unprecedented accomplishment: his career lasted for 50 years) that lured people onto the dance floor who sat out every other song (and his work is sampled in many other artists’ hits as well). He also had a dramatic personal life; he was in prison both before he was famous and after the peak of his fame had passed, had many children by many different women (some of whom he married, some he did not) and, through the years, had a slew of domestic violence charges filed against him. They, of course, were not the reason he went to prison.

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Chadwick Boseman as James Brown

 

But why would anyone make a film of this terrible script (by British screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth)? The previous film of director, Tate Taylor, The Help, gave him some experience with awful scripts about Black characters, but the main motivation for making the dull, sloppy, overlong Get On Up seems to be “We got the funding!” I’m not a fan of Taylor Hackford’s (award-winning) Ray, but at least that film, also about a musical icon and Black man who was, to put it mildly, not easy to get along with, had the bones of a better movie within it–a study of how a trusting and good-natured young person, after being repeatedly taken advantage of and discriminated against, becomes a suspicious asshole as he becomes older, even to those who mean him no harm. In Get On Up we see Brown, from the start in flashbacks from both 1988, when he was arrested after a high speed chase with the police, and in the 1960s when he toured Vietnam (the film jumps around in time for no discernible reason) as a crazed, dictatorial chatterbox. After the plane the band is in gets hit by mortar fire, Brown lectures a white army minder, “You want to go down in history as the man who killed the funk?”

The lead actor, Chadwick Boseman, doesn’t look like Brown (though as Brown ages, the incompetent makeup team try to make a resemblance out of rubber, leaving Boseman to try to act his way through the layers), but he does capture Brown’s distinctive voice and presence: smiling at first with joy and then a moment later letting paranoia and menace settle into his face. When Boseman, as Brown, dances on television during a performance before the Rolling Stones (in their first trip to America) I was reminded of an interview with Tina Turner in which she said that Mick Jagger didn’t dance when he sang with the Stones until after they’d toured with her. In archival footage, Jagger’s ’60s dance moves also seem to owe a lot to the early James Brown (who upstaged the Stones in their joint TV appearance), but Jagger is one of the film’s producers, so we don’t see the legacy of white performers “borrowing” from Black ones.

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Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) and Vicki Anderson (Aunjanue Ellis)

 

Like Ray, the best thing about Get On Up are the Black actresses in it. Even though many of them are just called on to flirt and smile, we still see more of of them than we do in the litany of movies that pretend Black women don’t exist. Octavia Spencer has a nice couple of moments as “Aunt Honey” the no-nonsense woman who reluctantly takes in young James after his father abandons him. She tells James, “Your mama’s a no-account fool. Your daddy too. But you ain’t gonna be.” But the standout is Viola Davis, as the mother who walks out on both father and son, and lets us see, in a late scene with Boseman, the humiliation she feels under her good-time persona. Earlier we witness a very simplified, sped-up pattern of abuse between Brown’s parents. His father (Lennie James) strikes Davis and then immediately demands sex, which she also seems eager for. Brown plays out the same scenario with his second wife (played by Jill Scott). This distortion of what happens in abusive relationships makes the violence we see seem like a fetish, an insult to all survivors of domestic abuse.

Like Ray’s Kerry Washington before her, Davis has found a role on television in a Shonda-Rhimes-produced series that gives her the chance to show off the full range of her talent, and maybe sometime in the future we’ll see a series that does the same for Aunjanue Ellis, who, in Get On Up,  looks great, in ’60s outfits and hairstyles and gives the world’s most piercing side-eye as Vicki Anderson, a backup singer in Brown’s band who later marries his best friend and band mate–he shared lead vocals with Brown and co-wrote the song “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”)–Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis). But Taura Cherne, Jacinte Blankenship, and Cariella Smith also leave indelible impressions during their brief time on camera. Whenever producers weakly say they couldn’t find good Black actresses for roles that usually end up going to white women, I can’t help thinking of all the talented Black women going to waste in films like this one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOS6ev6hQ0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Women of Color in Film and TV: The Terrible, Awful Sweetness of ‘The Help’

Mmm…empty calories. Like The Help?
Guest post written by Natalie Wilson, originally published at Ms. Magazine. Cross-posted with permission.
If Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was an angel food cake study of racism and segregation in the ’60s South, the new movie adaptation is even fluffier. Like a dollop of whip cream skimmed off a multi-layered cake, the film only grazes the surface of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender and geohistory.
Let me admit that I was, in contrast to Ms. blogger Jennifer Williams, looking forward to the film adaptation of The Help, especially as I initially enjoyed the book. However, in hindsight, I realize my initial reaction to the book was naïve (and possibly compromised by a Christmas-chocolate-induced haze).
I maintain the novel is a good read. But its shortcomings – its nostalgia, its failure to really grapple with structural inequality, its privileging of the white narrator’s voice and its reliance on stock characters – are heightened rather than diminished in the film.
While the civil rights movement was a mere “backdrop” in the book, in the film it is even less so: a photo here, a news clip there, as if protagonist Skeeter, with her intrepid reporting, discovers that wow, racism exists – and it’s ugly! And even with these occasional hints that the nation was sitting on top of a racist powder keg, overall, civil rights are miscast as an individual rather than a collective struggle. To judge by The Help, overcoming inequality requires pluck (Skeeter), sass (Minnie) or quiet determination (Aibileen), not social movements.
Also gone is the book’s suggestion that male privilege works to disempower and disenfranchise women in the same way white privilege works to disempower and disenfranchise people of color. While admittedly the novel problematically framed black males as more “brutish” than whites, at least it nodded towards the ways in which hierarchies of race, sex and class intersect and enable each other. The relatively powerful white wives are “lorded over” by their husbands (or, in Skeeter’s case, her potential husband), then turn around and tyrannize their black maids in much the same fashion. The movie, in contrast, puts an even happier face on men/women relations than on black/white ones.
Simultaneously, it frames Skeeter, Minnie and Aibileen as a trinity of feminist heroes, but rewards only Skeeter with the feminist prize at film’s end – an editing job in New York. In the meantime, Aibileen has lost her job but walks the road home determinedly, vowing she will become a writer, while Minnie sits down to a feast prepared by Celia Foote, her white boss.
The audience is thus given a triple happy ending. The first, Skeeter’s, suggests it only takes determination to succeed – white privilege has nothing to do with it! The second, Aibileen’s, implies that earning a living as a writer was feasible for a black maid in the Jim Crow South. The third, Minnie’s, insinuates not only that friendship eventually blossomed between white women bosses and their black maids, but also that such friendship was enough to ameliorate the horrors of racism.
Thus, if the book was “pop lit with some racial lessons thrown in for fiber” as Erin Aubry Kaplan’s described it, the film has even less bulk. Instead, it’s a high-fructose concoction as sweet as Minnie’s pies. And like Minnie’s “terrible awful” pie, with which she infamously tricks the villainous Hilly into eating shit, the film encourages audiences to swallow down a sweet story and ignore the shitty Hollywood cliches – as well as the shitty reality that racism can’t be “helped” by stories alone.
As Jennifer Williams predicted, the film indeed offers:

The perfect summer escape for viewers who embrace the fantasy of a postracial America, [where] filmgoers can tuck the history of race and class inequality safely in the past, even as the recession deepens already profound racial gaps in wealth and employment.

To put it another way, viewers can tuck into this terrible awful slice of the past, forgetting how the ingredients that shaped pre-Civil Rights America have a seemingly endless shelf life and, even more pertinent, still constitute a mainstay of our diet.
Further Reading: For an in-depth analysis of the film in its historical context, check out An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help by the Association of Black Women Historians.
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Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.