December Movie Roundup Part 3: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Midnight Sky

Well, movie theaters might still be closed in NYC but Netflix is assuring I have no dearth of movies to watch. Two further entries into the potential Oscar race arrived this month, and while they feature wildly different stories, both are worth your consideration.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Based on August Wilson's play, the movie largely takes place in a recording studio in Chicago in 1927 on a sweltering summer day, where legendary blues singer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) is set to record an album with her band. There are tensions among the band members, with the trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman in his final film performance) wanting to play some of his own arrangements and getting into fights with the older members who know that Ma is set in her ways and won't allow for any changes. There are tensions between Ma and her white manager and the white studio owner, who are desperate for her to start on time and record this album. As the film progresses, those tensions keep rising, everyone gets sweatier, there are more arguments, there are bitter recriminations, and everything crescendos and spirals out of control.

The central performances from Davis and Boseman are the main reason to watch this movie, along with the searing August Wilson dialogue. These two characters represent such pivotal aspects of the Black experience in America, and despite being set in 1927, these characters might as well exist in 2020. Ma Rainey is a Black woman who has "made it" and she wants to ensure she is given the respect she is due. This is a woman who emphatically knows her worth and will not let others push her around - she tells her bandleader that she knows her white manager can't risk offending her until he has her voice recorded, so until then, he had better meet all her demands. Meanwhile, Levee is a Black man with a traumatic past who is trying to get the fame and fortune that Ma has already earned. Unfortunately, he acts like she does without having earned it yet, and he constantly feels beaten down by the world. When his bandmates accuse him of being over-friendly to the white studio owner who has promised to look at Levee's arrangements, we learn more about this man's history and ambitions, and it's a dark and twisted, and sadly all too common tale of the things people endure to escape their past.

Directed by George C. Wolfe and adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, this movie is well-executed and sublimely acted, and will likely get some acting nominations for Boseman and Davis. Neither of them are playing "likable" characters but they are playing brilliantly flawed and talented human beings who end up taking very different paths in life. While the action all takes place in one afternoon, that's all it takes to understand these characters' life stories and where they're headed. It's a relevant movie for our time, made all the more bittersweet by its being our final chance to see Boseman play such a complex character on screen.

The Midnight Sky: Directed by George Clooney, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, this is the movie you're seeking if you need to acknowledge the sense of the impending apocalypse with some beautiful science fiction wonderment. Is this movie bleak and an attempt to figure out what the point of humanity is? Yes. Can you ignore all that and just be captivated by some incredible scenes set in space? Also yes.

The story takes place on Earth and in space. On Earth, we've got the grizzled Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney), a scientist who has stayed on an Arctic base after some sort of cataclysmic event has rendered the surface of the planet mostly uninhabitable. While the surviving members of the human race have all gone underground, he remains on the surface, wanting to contact the astronauts on any returning space missions to tell them not to land on the planet. The only people he can contact are the crew of the Aether, who are returning from a successful mission from K-23, one of Jupiter's moons that was discovered to be habitable. 

There is a lot of drama aboard the Aether mission and you will follow the crew (consisting of a stalwart cast of Felicity Jones, David Oyelewo, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler, and Tiffany Boone) as they try to make contact with Earth, then deal with various setbacks, and wrestle with what to do once they know Earth is no longer habitable. It's an emotional and moving film and and there's as much drama amongst the Aether crew in space as there is on Earth where we get flashbacks of Augustine's life and watch him struggle to figure out if his life's work ultimately meant anything at all. Ethan Peck plays the younger Clooney in flashbacks, and let me say, that man should play young Clooney in everything because he's got that impression down. 

The movie's final idea of what makes life worth living feels very pertinent to Clooney's current stage of life. Younger Clooney who was gadding about was less likely to make this film, but it is pretty clear to me that this story now has a deeply personal resonance for him. It's a good movie that could certainly be accused of being gimmicky in places, but at the end of the day, it has a heartfelt tale to tell and does it well. It would have been even more beautiful to watch on the big screen, but for now, I'm content to watch spacewalks from my living room and contemplate my existence. Happy 2020 to us all.