Tag: Viola Davis

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

Terminally dull prequel, full of backstory you won’t care about at all

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow), Rachel Zegler (Lucy Gray Baird), Josh Andrés Rivera (Sejanus Plinth), Viola Davis (Dr Volumnia Gaul), Peter Dinklage (Casca Highbottom), Jason Schwatzman (“Lucky” Flickerman), Hunter Schafer (Tigris Snow), Fionnula Flanagan (Grandma’am), Burn Gorman (Commander Hoff), Ashley Liao (Clemensia Dovecote)

Did you watch Hunger Games and wonder – ‘this is great and all but where did that guy Coriolanus Snow come from, eh’? Not sure I did. And I’m not sure I really needed to know, now that I’ve sat through all interminable 158 minutes of Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes or Hitler: The Early Days. Imagine, if you will, the original Hunger Games movie – but if it was much longer, had an utterly uninteresting lead character and took itself so seriously you’d think it was offering a solution to third world debt and climate change all at once. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes worst crime isn’t that it goes on forever, that it retreads old ground with no new ideas or that it feels like a pointlessly over-extended footnote. It’s that it is overwhelmingly, crushingly, dull.

People didn’t care about the back story: they cared about Katniss Everdean, a perfectly crafted character, hugely engaging and relatable on every viewing. I cared about her struggle to protect the people she loved not the backdrop of Panem politics. Did anyone? If I was interested in anything in Panem politics it was the way the Games both terrified the huddle masses of the districts and gave them hope. Unfortunately, this film either didn’t understand that, didn’t care or assumed we’d happily invest in the original’s villain if he was buff and had a dreamy girlfriend.

Young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, doing his best to sound like Donald Sutherland) is one of the leading students in Panem, selected to mentor a tribute through the 10^th Hunger Games. Young Snow’s loins heat-up when his tribute is manic pixie dream-girl Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) from District Twelve. But what excites him more: a tumble with a girl from the sticks, or persuading outlandishly loopy games master Dr Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, the only person having fun) he knows how to turn this gladiatorial deathmatch into ratings gold? You got one guess what he picks.

Though it takes him a very, very, very long time to pick it. We watch this Proto-Hitler embrace his inner sociopath, through a weary trudge in Hunger Games lore with the origins of virtually every prop in the original movies lovingly laid out for us. Ever wondered why Snow wears that buttonhole? This is the film for you and then some. Almost every single thing in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is linked to something in the original movies. It’s the sort of unimaginative, world-shrinking yawn-fest where nearly every character shares a surname of a character from the original films – but of course Caesar Flickerman’s dad has exactly the same job, personae and style as he does!

You could let this go if Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had an interesting story of its own. But it’s tedious, self-important plot makes Attack of the Clones look like Tolstoy. It chucks in a little bit of arena slaughter, but inexplicably makes it unclear how many of Coriolanus’ suggestions for improving the show are actually changing things. When the tributes perform for ‘favour’ is that something they always did (as most people behave like it is) or because Coriolanus scrawled memo suggested it (as the film implies)? The wider impact is also lost: are people bonding with Lucy Gray or having their child-killing-urges ticked in brand new ways by Coriolanus? Who knows.

It doesn’t help that Ballad seems shy about making Coriolanus himself a villain. It gives Tom Blyth a difficult act to pull off and he’s left playing his cards so close to his (inevitably) buff – his future sadism doesn’t stand in the way of a good topless scene in this film – chest that rather than wondering what will top him into sociopathy, he instead becomes a flat, boring character, with even his lust for Lucy fizzling rather than sizzling.

Rachel Zegler gets a bit more fun as this irritating mix of idealist and realist (she is pretty much whatever the plot needs from scene-to-scene – one minute angrily slapping away offerings of food, the next cowering in shocked fear when danger comes calling), with Ballad at least a good vehicle for Zegler’s vocal talents. But Lucy Gray remains too enigmatic – and, to be honest, just as dull in her unknowability – to ever become someone you care about. And never, for one minute, in her flower-crafted dress and perfect make-up do you believe she is a child of the ghetto in the way you did with Jennifer Lawrence.

Honestly the film misses a hero as complex and multi-layered as Katniss and splitting facets of her into two other characters just creates to incomplete characters. Throw in a plot that lacks any energy – it’s lackadaisical second half, with Coriolanus chucked into the wilderness as a Stormtrooper in District 12, goes on forever – and which gets bogged down in an utterly unengaging and confusing rebellion plotline with is resolved with a nonsensical narrative flourish – and it’s a recipe for disaster. It never, ever get the pulse racing as it stumbles, yawningly, to its end.

The stuff that actually is interesting gets shunted to the sidelines. A bored Peter Dinklage gets a late monologue on the creation of the Hunger Games that you desperately want to hear more about it, but don’t. Viola Davis, barrelling over-the-top under a mountain of demented hair, weird contact lenses and bizarre costumes, keeps talking about ‘the purpose of the Hunger Games’ in a portentous way that sounds like its leading somewhere but never does (so much so, I wondered if the filmmakers even understood the bread-and-circuses-as-control metaphor going on here).

Francis Lawrence directs as if this background-filling pamphlet from Suzanne Collins was a newly discovered Testament. The film is slow, stately and gives even the smallest, most inconsequential moments an unbearable level of self-important significance. It lacks pace and interest – so much so that even the slaughter of eleven scruffy, malnourished children and teenagers feels tired and ‘seen it all before’. There is no mystery, no sense of roads-not-taken, not even any peril . Just small elements of a more interesting later story being slotted dutifully in place, you realise you never wondered where Coriolanus Snow came from because it never mattered in the first place.

The Woman King (2022)

Punchy historical action epic is very entertaining (if not hugely original narratively) as well as being a triumph of representation

Director: Gina Prince-Bythe

Cast: Viola Davis (General Nanisca), Thuso Mbedu (Nawi), Lashana Lynch (Izogie), Sheila Atim (Amenza), John Boyega (King Ghezo), Hero Fiennes Tiffin (Santo Ferreira), Adrienne Warren (Ode), Jayme Lawson (Shante), Masali Baduza (Fumbe), Angélique Kidjo (The Meunon), Jimmy Odukoya General Oba Ade), Thando Dlomo (Kelu), Jordan Bolger (Malik)

It’s 1823 in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey. The kingdom is trapped in the middle of a host of competing interests: most notably the rival Oyo empire and the European slavers controlling the region’s main port. Dahomey depends for its security on the Agojie, an elite group of women warriors commanded by their respected general Nanisca (Viola Davis). War brews between Dahomey and Oyo, and Nanisca is pushing King Ghezo (John Boyega) to end Dahomey’s involvement in the slave trade. At the same time, a new Agojie recruit, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) brings memories of past traumas flooding back to Nanisca – might she and Nawi have some lost bond?

The Woman King is a pulsating action film, a mixture of Braveheart and Black Panther (it even has a cold open, as the Agojie storm an Oyo village to save captured Dahomey citizens bound for the slave ships, that feels like a straight lift from the latter film’s opening). Proudly celebrating both women and black people (men are very much in secondary roles, while the only white character is a hypocritical slaver played with relish by Hero Fiennes Tiffin), it’s a punch in the solar plexus for what’s been a male-dominated genre.

Watching it I suddenly realised, half-way through, that if the film had been made 10 or 15 years ago, the plucky new recruit having to prove she belonged among the Agojie would have been played by a white actress. There would have been a flashback to the child being found by the Agojie and then a montage of her searching from fear to longing to emulate the women around her. Like Cruise in The Last Samurai, she would have become the best-of-the-best, accepted by her new black sisterhood. It’s a triumph that Hollywood no longer needs stories like this filtered through white eyes before they would even consider bringing them to the screen.

Instead, the focus is strongly on a story that wants to celebrate the rich culture and history of African kingdoms. Dahomey’s civilisation, advanced farming and irrigation, egalitarian culture and humane religious and spiritual practices, are shown in loving detail. Their tenuous position as a small kingdom surrounded by rivals is carefully presented, just as the corrupting nature of European powers is made clear. It is they who have turned slavery – an ever-present in African history – into an industry that dominates the African economy and has led to a subtle devaluation of human lives that many Africans openly collaborate in.

In this, Prince-Bythe’s tightly directed film juggles a coming-of-age story for Nawi with a coming-to-terms story for Nanisca. It’s a film that manages to present both in the context of a series of action set-pieces and exciting training montages (the Agojie effectively have to complete a massive obstacle course to qualify as a member of the sisterhood). To be honest, much in the film isn’t really that original, more a remix of set-pieces and ideas from similar films. What makes it stand out is the representation and the context where it is taking place.

It also allows impressive actors to take on roles way outside of public expectations. None more so than Viola Davis, whose pumped up physique shatters any perceptions of what you might expect. This is a tour-de-force role from Davis, as she plays a defiant and strong woman, secretly terrified of trauma in her own past (and worries about her own weakness) who leads by charismatic example, but is just as capable of unjust slap-downs. She’s a woman struggling to embrace all facets of herself, doing so in the spotlight of a whole country looking to her for leadership. It makes for a powerful performance from Davis, perfectly fusing her skill at playing matronly warmth, imperious distance and deep reserves of determination and courage.

There are similarly excellent performances from a uniformly strong cast, with Lashana Lynch a stand-out as a courageous fighter who surprises herself with her mentorship abilities. Thuso Mbedu gives a star-making turn as Nawi, a young woman who matches Nanisca for bull-headedness and suppressed self-doubt, who reveals herself as a natural leader. Shelia Atim is excellent as Nanisca’s level-headed trusted number two, while John Boyega walks perfectly a fine-line of a man teetering between being a wise leader and a playboy.

They are helped by a film that may lack originality in its plotting and structure, but makes up for that with its warmth for its characters, and the gritty, involving realism of its shooting. Prince-Bythe keeps the pace of the film running smoothly and stages each of the film’s many set-pieces with a dynamism that keep you on the edge of your seat. She also successfully manages to incorporate some searching material around Nanisca’s past traumas without being exploitative.

Historically, the film is a little dubious, walking a carefully curated line on Dahomey’s involvement in slavery (in many ways it might have been better if the film was set in a fictional kingdom inspired by Dahomey). It doesn’t dwell on the Agojie chaining up their captives to be shipped to the slavery markets. It pushes an anti-slavery message strongly – but ignores the historical fact that the real Ghezo continued in the trade until the bitter end. (Legitimate points could have been made about his right to the same compensation as plantation owners elsewhere.) There is a complex, difficult story here that the film romanticises into something with cleaner rights and wrongs.

But, with a history of poor representation and white-only-lens view on African culture in film, you can forgive a film aiming to redress that balance. Strongly directed, exciting and crowd-pleasing, with well-drawn characters played with real skill by a very strong cast, it might recycle many ideas from other films, but it does it with a compelling freshness.

Widows (2018)

Sexism, racism and corruption get mixed in with crime drama in McQueen’s electric heist film

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Viola Davis (Veronica Rawlings), Michelle Rodriguez (Linda), Elizabeth Debicki (Alice), Cynthia Erivo (Belle), Colin Farrell (Jack Mulligan), Brian Tyree Henry (Jamal Manning), Daniel Kaluuya (Jatemme Manning), Jacki Weaver (Agnieska), Carrie Coon (Amanda), Robert Duvall (Tom Mulligan), Liam Neeson (Harry Rawlings), Jon Bernthal (Florek), Garret Dillahunt (Bash), Lukas Haas (David)

A getaway goes wrong and Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his criminal gang all wind-up dead and their loot burned up. Their last job was cleaning out the election fund of gangster-turned-electoral-candidate Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning believes he’s owed a debt by Harry’s widow Veronica (Viola Davis). On the hock for millions, Veronica has no choice but to recruit the widows of Harry’s gang to help her pull off the next job Harry planned: cleaning out the campaign fund of Manning’s electoral rival Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell).

Adapted from an 80s British TV mini-series, Widows has been run through Steve McQueen’s creative brain, emerging as a compelling, beautifully shot crime drama mixing social, racial and gender commentary with blistering action. It takes a traditionally masculine genre – the crime caper – and places at its heart a group of women motivated by desperation and survival rather than the lure of lucre.

What’s particularly interesting is that none of these women fit the bill of the sort of person you expect to arrange a daring heist. Viola Davis’ Veronica is a retired teachers’ union rep; Elizabeth Debicki an abuse victim, treated terribly by her husband and selfish mother; Michelle Rodriguez a shop owner desperately trying to give her kids a chance, despite her husband’s reckless gambling. Even the driver they hire, played by Cynthia Erivo, is a hairdresser and babysitter. These women are a world away from the ruthless criminals you’d expect to pull off this kind of operation.

It’s probably why they are routinely underestimated and patronised by men. Veronica is advised clear her debt by selling either everything she owns and disappear. As with the rest of the women, the world expects her to put up and shut up. These are women defined by their husbands and the expectation that their needs are subordinate to others’. Debicki’s Alice is all-but pushed into escort work by her demanding mother, while Rodriguez’s Linda is blamed by her mother-in-law for her husband’s death. But these women have a steely survival instinct that makes them determined and (eventually) ruthless enough to take this job on.

Davis is superb as a determined and morally righteous woman, whose principles are more flexible than she thinks. She efficiently (and increasingly sternly) applies her organisational skills to planning the heist, pushing her crew to adapt her own professionalism. Davis wonderfully underplays Veronica’s grief, not only at the loss of her husband but also the recent death of her son (shot by police officers while reaching to answer his phone behind the wheel of an expensive car – in front of a wall of Obama “Hope” posters, a truly striking visual image).

Her co-stars are equally impressive. Debicki has mastered the mix of vulnerability and strength behind characters like this (how many times has she played suffering, glamourous gangster molls?). Her Alice gains the self-belief to push back against those exploiting her. Rodriguez beautifully balances grief at the loss of her husband with fury at the financial hole he has left her in. Erivo gets the smallest role, but makes Bella dry, loyal and sharp. All four of them use the way men underestimate them – seeing them as widows, wives, weak or sex objects – to plan out their heist.

The reversal of gender expectations crosses over with the social political commentary McQueen wants to explore. This sometimes works a treat: the flashback to the shooting of Veronica’s son is shockingly effective. But the film’s dives into the Chicago political scene and the deep class divisions in the city don’t always have the impact they should. There is a marvellous shot – all in one take, mounted on the car bonnet – as Farrell’s Mulligan travels (in a few minutes) from a photo op in a slum back to his palatial family home, emphasising how closely extreme wealth and poverty sit side-by-side in America.

Both candidates are corrupted in different ways. Jamal Manning – a knife behind a smile from Brian Tyree Henry – is a thug talking the talk to line his pockets. Farrell’s Mulligan has more standards – and you wish for more with this fascinating put-upon son part on-the-take, part genuinely wanting to help. His domineering dad – an imperiously terrifying Robert Duvall, who wants to backseat drive his son in office – demeans his son, shouts racial slurs and bullies everyone around him. Politics: your choice is the latest off-spring of a semi-corrupt dynasty or a literal criminal.

But the film doesn’t quite find the room to explore these issues in quite as much detail as you feel it could: it’s a strong hinterland of inequality, but you want more. McQueen however, does have a gift for unique character details that speak volumes: the women’s operation is shadowed by an electric Daniel Kaluuya, as Manning’s calm yet psychotic brother, who listens to self-education podcasts on Black history and shoots people without a second thought. He, of course, underestimates the women as much as everyone else. That’s as much of a political statement as anything else: none of the men in this film seem to even begin to think that they could be in a world which is truly equal.

The film adds a late act reveal that doesn’t quite work – and the film as a whole is trying to do a little too much – but it’s a confirmation of what a gifted and superb film-maker Steve McQueen is. McQueen shoots even conventional scenes in unique and interesting ways – check out his brilliant use of mirrors throughout – uses editing superbly to set tone and is brilliant at drawing the best from talented actors. Widows is crammed full of terrifically staged scenes and gallops along with pace and excitement. It’s a fine example of a great director turning a genre film into something deeper.

Fences (2016)

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis triumph in an overly theatrical version of August Wilson’s Fences

Director: Denzel Washington

Cast: Denzel Washington (Troy Maxson), Viola Davis (Rose Lee Maxson), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Jim Bono), Jovan Adepo (Cory Maxson), Russell Hornsby (Lyons Maxson), Mykelti Williamson (Gabriel Maxson), Saniyya Sidney (Raynell Maxson)

Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) works as a garbage collector after his dreams of becoming a professional baseball player came up against the colour bar. Troy lives with his second wife Rose (Viola Davis). Troy had a troubled upbringing, turning to crime (and serving time in prison – lost time Rose quietly believes may have had more of an impact on his failed baseball career) and claims to have beaten Death in a wrestling match. Proud of his self-made status and certain, always, that he is right, Troy has difficult relations with his two sons Lyons (Russell Hornsby), a musician he believes is forever sponging money and Cory (Jovan Adepo), a teenager being scouted by an American Football team.

Fences follows a couple of years (with a coda that jumps forward five years) in the lives of these characters, and principally the impact that Troy’s mixture of pride, selfishness and bull-headed self-righteousness has on the family. It’s adapted from August Wilson’s award-winning stage-play, with a script prepared before his death by the playwright himself (earning him a posthumous Oscar nomination). Washington, Davis and most of the cast all starred in a hugely successful Broadway production of the play a few years before, and the film is a careful restaging of this production.

Perhaps a little too careful. If there is a problem with Fences, it is that it falls rather awkwardly between two stools. It’s neither particularly filmic – few of the scenes have been adjusted from the single-set locations of the play, and it’s filmed with an unobtrusive conventionality that makes it look and feel pretty similar to watching a National Theatre Live production – nor is it sufficiently theatrical. I can well imagine the power – and they are undeniably powerful – performances by the cast, principally Washington and Davis, would have blown you away live: but on screen, they can’t quite capture that same impact, in a film that feels slightly constrained by its theatricality.

Most of this comes from Washington’s determination that Wilson’s words would be the star, and all other factors in the production would service that. To that end, the film is a clear success – and you can’t argue Wilson doesn’t deserve a certain reverence, particularly as transfers of his plays to film had been almost non-existent before Fences. Wilson’s plays have rarely crossed the Atlantic, so watching this – a play I was not familiar with – I was enraptured by the working-class poetry of Wilson’s language, not to mention the empathy with which he explores his characters.

At the heart is Troy, a fascinatingly flawed human being. Played with huge charisma, which masks a deep bitterness, cynicism and self-pity, by Denzel Washington, Troy manages to be both admirable and destructive at the same time. You can’t not admire the way he has built his own life from scratch, or the “go-out-and-grab-it” balls that helps him become the first black garbage truck driver in Pittsburgh. He’s witty, warm-hearted and loves his family deeply. He’s also domineering, proud and so convinced his view is right that he sees no problem with cheating on his wife or forcing his children, often against their will, to conform with exactly his ideas of how they should live their lives.

So, he’ll tell his son that because Troy’s dreams of becoming a professional sportsman came to nothing, so will his: so there isn’t even any point trying. He loves his mentally handicapped brother Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), and rages at the Government that failed to support this wounded veteran – but he also takes Gabe’s disability payout and uses it to buy himself a house and charge Gabe rent for living in it. He’ll talk endlessly about putting duty and family first – but that fence of the title, which Rose asks constantly him to build, is a job he’ll put off time and time again in favour of holding court in his backyard. Troy’s built the family – but he’s also the main factor holding it back from moving forward any further. He’s a classic tragic figure.

Equally superb is Viola Davis as Rose, endlessly patient and caring, holding the entire family together and quietly and carefully cleaning up after Troy’s outbursts or bad temper. Davis won the Oscar, and Rose is a dream of a part a woman who closes her eyes to problems, believing she lives a perfect family life, until it is too late. When finally confronted with the selfishness of Troy’s actions, Davis’ emotional devastation – her resentment and fury at having benched her own dreams and desires to service Troy – is hugely moving, perfectly showcasing Davis’ skill to play deep emotions while simultaneously holding those emotions in.

These two actors are both extraordinary – and there are also fabulous performances from Henderson, Adepo, Williamson and Hornsby. What stops it from being an outstanding film though is that its more of a theatrical event pushed into a cinema. With the majority of the scenes taking place in Troy and Rose’s backyard, you can picture the single-set theatre production. The camera moves calmly from close-up to medium shot but does very little else. Very little has also been changed or reworked in the play – compare to Arthur Miller’s reworking of The Crucible or Peter Shaffer’s re-imagining of Amadeus for the screen. It’s a film with a slightly worthy, mission quality to it. But as a showcase for the play – and the performances – it’s very fine.

Doubt (2008)

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep wrestle with certainty and Doubt

Director: John Patrick Shanley

Cast: Meryl Streep (Sister Aloysius Beauvier), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Father Brendan Flynn), Amy Adams (Sister James), Viola Davis (Mrs Miller), Joseph Foster (Donald Miller)

It’s 1964 in a Bronx Catholic School, run with an iron hand by Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). This arch-conservative is in the middle of an unspoken struggle with progressive reformer priest Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who doesn’t feel Catholicism has to be stern, unyielding and guilt-inducing. These tensions underlie Sister Aloysius’ concerns about Father Flynn’s closeness to the boys – in particular the school’s only black student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster). When young and naïve Sister James (Amy Adams) reports that Donald returned from a meeting with Father Flynn with alcohol on his breath, Sister Aloysius is convinced Flynn is guilty of sexual misdemeanours – and makes it her mission to remove him from the school.

Adapted from a Tony-Award winning play, and directed by its author John Patrick Shanley, Doubt is an intense, well-staged, subtle opening-out of a four-hander, that works on screen due to Shanley’s flexibility with the material and the wonderful performances from the four principals. The story serves as a parable of sorts for clerical sex scandals, but ties this smartly into questions of faith and the limits of belief.

Because there are no clear answers in the film (or the play). We never know with cast-iron certainty if Father Flynn is guilty or not. All we have are his passionate denials, Sister Aloysius’ equally passionate certainty of his guilt, and a few moments we witness of his interaction with Donald Miller and the other students that are left open to interpretation. Tied into this as well, we have a very clear clash between modernisers and conservatives within the church – and we worry that, in being drawn towards the more sympathetic Flynn, we are in fact rooting for a sex-offender.

Doubt is a film that is likely to keep you questioning who you believe. I even found that repeat viewings can change your perspective on guilt or innocence – this time I was far more alarmed by Hoffman’s genial Father Flynn than I remembered (a lecture on clean nails he gives to the boys walks a wonderful line between hygiene and unsettling creep). Shanley’s expansion gives us more scenes of Flynn interacting with other priests. It’s clear the priesthood is a boisterous boys club, with jokes and drinking – much more fun than the staid, milk-drinking silence of the nuns’ meals – but this is also the clubbish pact of secrecy that let real-life paedophiles be quietly moved from parish to parish.

Sister Aloysius may be practically a poster-child for why people find religion off-putting, but she’s absolutely on-the-money in her determination to root out abuse. Yet while her determination to rid the church of abusers is genuine, does she really believe in Flynn’s guilt, or is it a prop she reaches for to justify her own dislike of him and his beliefs about the church? We’re never certain.

And that is part of the smartness of Shanley’s work. Because in the end all we have to go on is faith and our own belief. Which is pretty much like the whole of religion itself. There is enough in the film to convince you of the guilt or innocence of Flynn, the upright justice or corrupt selfishness of Aloysius. Their approaches to religion are radically different – Flynn sees it as their duty to be open and involve the community, to integrate their interests; to Aloysius the church only works if it is strict, austere and sets a moral example to all. A meeting between the two of them is a masterclass in micro-aggressions over everything from choice of chairs, pouring of tea, serving of sugar, closing blinds, you name it.

This is the trace of theatre in the piece – and theatre is when it is at is strongest. Shanley’s direction is largely unfussy, although he is prone to overuse Dutch angles to hammer home the uncertainty and to overplay a metaphor of the wind (a storm is coming you know!). But when he avoids too much fuss, the film is very effective. The opening up of the play works very well, with most of the additional characters (be they added nuns, parishioners or children in the school) largely used as silent extras that help to create a wider world as well as adding more reaction shots that help us build up even more our questions and doubts about the versions of a story we are hearing..

And the added question over this is the identity of the victim. As the only black child in the school, does his dependence on Flynn come from Donald’s sense of isolation? Is he vulnerable because of bullying and simply in need of the genuine kindness of a substitute father figure, in place of the bullying and violent father he actually has? Or does this isolation make him the perfect target for a predator? Most daringly, Foster’s mother (brilliantly played by Viola Davis in a single extended scene) when confronted with the possibility of abuse by Sister Aloysius even suggests that abuse might be price worth paying for the opportunities being at the school will give her son, the sort of opportunities his parents never dreamed of. Race is a low-key note, but it’s there.

Doubt’s real strengths are in the acting. All four of the principals were Oscar-nominated. Streep was the obvious choice as Sister Aloysius and she delivers one of her finest performances. Aloysius is stern, unbending, dangerously, even recklessly certain of herself and her faith in herself as a force of justice – but believes she is acting for the best motives (or at least is very vocal that she is, rather that is actually true is a whole other question). Streep adds wit (this is after all a woman who views ballpoint pens as the end of civilisation), but also understanding of the vulnerabilities under Aloysius’ rigid conservatism. It’s an outstanding performance.

Amy Adams is charmingly sweet and endearing as a woman caught between two poles, naturally inclined to Flynn’s liberalism and desire to win hearts as well as minds – but also open to using Aloysius’s tactics in the classroom in her struggle to maintain order. Sharply divided, Adams leaves it open whether her desire to see the best in people make her either saint-like or a rube. Hoffman walks an extraordinarily difficult tight-rope as a character both engagingly warm but also (by necessity) unknowable and unreadable. It’s a performance bursting with emotion, but which skilfully disguises that emotion’s motivations. Davis offers a master-class of restrained anxiety, using every ounce of control to keep her difficult life together.

Doubt is a thought-provoking and well-handled staging of a very-good play. Brilliantly acted, it expands the staging of the play but never loses sight of what makes it effective to start with: and will leave you thinking over small moments and as uncertain about truth and prejudice as Sister Aloysius is at its conclusion.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)

Chadwick Boseman excels in his final performance in the stagy Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Director: George C Wolfe

Cast: Viola Davis (Ma Rainey), Chadwick Boseman (Levee Green), Glynn Turman (Toledo), Colman Domingo (Cutler), Michael Potts (Slow Drag), Jonny Coyne (Mel Sturdyvant), Taylor Paige (Dussie Mae), Jeremy Shamod (Irvin), Dusan Brown (Sylvester)

In a Chicago recording studio in July 1927, while the sun beats down outside, blues singer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) is due to record some of her greatest hits. But she’s almost an hour late. The people who made it on time are her backing jazz band. Cutler (Colman Domingo), Toledo (Glynn Turman) and Slow Drag (Michael Potts) are seasoned pros. But trumpet player Levee Green (Chadwick Boseman) is something else, an ambitious and electric young man who feels he knows what the new sound is in a way that Ma doesn’t. Over an afternoon, as Ma flexes her power upstairs, the white agent and recording studio owner fret, and tensions between the band members slowly simmer towards and explosion.

It’s impossible to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom right now without being very aware of the tragic early death of Chadwick Boseman. Boseman passed away while the film was in post-production, and it’s hard not to guiltily wonder if Boseman was aware this was to be his final performance. Either way, this was a stunning way for this electric, James Dean-like talent to sign off – a scintillating, passionate performance as a man carrying huge burdens and deeply repressed griefs and guilt. August Wilson’s play provides several key set-piece speeches for Levee – and Boseman burns through them with an intensity that will leave its mark on you.

Bright-eyed, with a wiry body of elastic tension that shifts from loose, jazzy movements to rigid bursts of fury, Boseman is extraordinary. Starting the film as seemingly an irresponsible, easy-going young man frustrated at the concessions of his elders, Boseman establishes a deep psychological pain at his core. He’s a young man who has seen his parents vilely mistreated by oppressive white men, who smiles to get what he wants but never forgets that the white bosses he works with see him as little better than a slave, ripe for exploiting. It’s a brilliant performance, one for the ages.

It dominates a film that is told with dynamism but never escapes its theatrical roots. Its set-piece speeches are virtuoso moments for the actors, but the silent observance with which they are watched by other actors feels more suited to theatre rather than the realism of film. The build towards the film’s tragic end, hinging on a moment of violence, is the sort of character breakdown that we accept in the theatre, but seems forced on film – especially when met with the sort of visual tableaux that seems to invite the curtain to come down. Wolfe directs what is very much a conversation piece in two locations with a great deal of energy and imagination – but it remains very much a theatrical venture at heart, where long speeches and elements of Greek tragedy (hubris, nemesis and character flaws) shape the plot.

But it doesn’t altogether matter when the ideas the film tackles are so vibrant and presented with such passion. It’s a film that sharply outlines the racial divide in America. Wilson’s play is all about how master/servant exploitation continues in America. Its early shots establish the only work black people in Chicago can find (all of it manual or secretarial), while the musicians are paid cash-in-hand, even Ma, because no bank will believe a black man hasn’t stolen a cheque.

“All they want is my voice” says Ma, and she’s right. A difficult prima-donna, unafraid of expressing her desires both musical and sexual, Davis is larger-than-life but impressive as the domineering Ma. But Ma behaves badly because it’s the only way she has of exerting some control in this environment. She won’t see the profits from this recording work (it will be the white men running the studio). So, just for a few hours, she wants to remind them that they rely on her. So, she’ll be late. She’ll demand a cold coke. And she’ll insist her stammering nephew speaks the opening monologue of the song, even if that does mean burning through several recording albums to get it right. Because Ma may be an artist, but she’s also a tool to these people – something they will use while she can earn them money, and will then cast aside the second she is done.

It’s the same with the band. And the older hands have accepted it. Sure, they have their resentments and their sadnesses – old pro Toledo even remembers when he had the fire like Levee has – but they understand the game. They are props in the white man’s game, and they are content to earn a decent living from something they like doing, knowing that they are still living a better life than many. Cutler even has his faith to bolster him, a faith Leveee rejects in Boseman’s most electric scene, with a speech that angrily denounces God for his unfairness towards black people.

Levee is another thing again to the rest of them. He has plans and ambitions and wants to form his own band. He’s written his own songs, which have far more of the zip that we know jazz is heading towards. He’ll play nice to get what he wants, but he’s not willing for a second to forget how racist the world is. And he won’t let go of his anger for a moment. Compromise for him only serves a purpose. His youthful defiance and lack of deference spark resentment in the others – who either can’t or won’t understand him – and even Ma, perhaps seeing him as a threat, can’t stand him.

It of course leads to tragedy – and a coda that grimly reminds us all that in this world there may be winners but the thing that unites them all is that they are white. Jazz music may be on the cusp of change – and Ma will pay that price in a few years – but America isn’t. You only need to look at how the musicians are treated to know that equality is a million miles away.

The cast are faultless. Turman carries a quiet sadness and resignation as the ageing Toledo. Colman Domingo is relaxed then taut as Cutler. Taylor Paige has a dangerously selfish energy as Ma’s younger lover Dussie. But it’s still more of a play than a film, even if it is told with pace and energy, acted with such flourish and passion. It leaves you with effective and engaging arguments, but it still feels like it work best in the theatre.