Television review: HBO's BESSIE

Bessie, HBO’s dizzying, blues-tinted biopic directed by Dee Rees, never achieves liftoff.

Centered on Bessie “Empress of the Blues” Smith, the film is classically "Hollywood biopic," for better and most definitely for worse. It spans decades, with its sense of obligation to most every relevant historical detail never less than palpable. In the titular role, Queen Latifah is remarkably good, and she has behind her a brilliant supporting cast that’s provided the opportunity to do great work. But the movie itself is devoid of deep feeling and an emotional center. It glides on by, with a rigid fidelity to the facts forsaking any kind of narrative structure or tonal cohesion. It is, to be clear, a missed opportunity.

Ms. Rees, an independent filmmaker whose previous feature, Pariah, was a beautifully-rendered exploration of racial and sexual identity, was an exciting choice to helm this long-overdue biography. She has a sense of style, a power with politics and a way with actors in her filmmaking. But she flounders under this film’s much more substantial task. Rather than rely on her strengths as a character-driven realist, she succumbs to the demands of the traditional biopic: detail every plot point, stuff in a good amount of music and hit the “afflicted artist” note plenty hard. There are sporadic bursts where her voice creeps through, both visually and in dialogue, and those irrefutably represent Bessie at its best. But whereas Ava DuVernay, another small-scale filmmaker who took on a major historical drama with Selma, explored a single moment in the extraordinary life of Martin Luther King, Rees tries to squeeze it all in. It’s blatantly overstuffed.

The movie is so speedy in progressing through Smith’s life, in fact, that despite its intoxicating turbulence, it falls flat from moment one. Bessie opens with Smith joining Blues legend Ma Rainey’s (Mo’Nique) musical act as a protegee. After a few scenes, she’s already upstaging her and is set to start her own company. The mentor-mentee relationship between the two, so rich and fascinating, gets the short shrift. It would have made a fine movie in and of itself.

But Rees is mostly interested in Bessie’s meteoric rise to success, and her personal challenges that could never be overcome despite an illustrious career. In effect, no moment breathes. It’s all disorienting. Latifah takes the many elements thrown at us and impressively filters them into a singular voice -- her Bessie is volatile, tormented, strong, smart and lonely -- but we still never get a deeper sense of the woman. The preoccupation with every little element of her life prevents her from emerging, flesh-and-blood. Like a panorama of Bessie’s life, it’s less about the details and more about the bigger picture.

And yet there are so many details. They're all stuffed into a cinematic expression that's deprived of actual, tangible narrative; beyond the story at hand, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It might appear to be the point, with Bessie unable to truly heal her wounds even as she achieves so much materially, but an airlessly optimistic ending effectively rules out that consideration. Overall, Rees documents Bessie's life too flatly, with no escalation in the drama and the progression of events too chaotic. In trying to include every aspect of her subject's incredible life, Rees reaches an outcome that's directly antithetical to her intent. Distinct details do not make a person -- we know a lot about Bessie by the end of the film, but as far as connecting with her very being, we also don’t know much at all.

I should step back and say that there is a lot to recommend here, beginning and ending with this collection of actors. On the page alone, Bessie boasts a cast of tremendous performers. Rees gives them all ample space to leave an impression. Mo’Nique is stellar as the imperiously iconic Ma Rainey, despite limited screentime. Khandi Alexander comes into the picture as Bessie’s resentful sister Viola, and as is typical for the actress, she imbues the character with deep complexity and a blackly comic edge. Perhaps best of the supporting cast is Michael K. Williams, the Wire and Boardwalk Empire standout who gets to show a new side of himself here. As Bessie’s opportunistic-but-loving husband Jack Gee, Williams is enormously sympathetic and intuitively plays his character as inherently flawed. There’s a melancholy to his performance, his welled eyes and crooked smile often the focus of Rees’ camera.

The progressivism running through Bessie hints at the movie that could have been. Rees’ treatment of her protagonist’s sexuality is sensitive, mature and open, and it should come as no surprise that the director seems most at home here. In intimate encounters between Bessie and her husband Jack, or her gorgeous young dancer girlfriend (played by Tika Sumpter), Rees tenderly identifies a striving for love and connection. But Bessie can't help but stray; her unbridgable emotional distance is sadly intrinsic to her character. Latifah plays this beautifully, as do Williams and Sumpter. In these moments, the childhood trauma hanging over Bessie is at its clearest and most affecting. And that Rees never really signals her sexuality as a point of major internal conflict is bravely up-front, especially considering the time period she’s working in.

Rees' effectiveness as a storyteller comes with time -- time to explore and play with her ideas. There's a specificity to her vision that, when able to come through, is breathlessly invigorating. You feel it in the way she captures Bessie's stress-eating, or Viola's terrified moment of beautification, privately donning lipstick before her sister walks in to inadvertently publicize her vulnerability.

Late in the film’s second act, you even start to sense Rees getting in a groove. Bessie buys a house, and calls on everyone from her loyal brother to her passionate husband to her nasty sister to live in it. “I want a family,” she says, wistfully. She’s trying to construct something that is hers, in a way we’ve seen her unable to romantically. Glimpses of the past, nicely filtered in by Rees without being overbearing, hint at a traumatic childhood. Bessie is using her means to overcome that by building something from scratch.

These scenes are full of life, passionate and soulful and richly evocative. In one stunning sequence, Latifah bares herself in front of a mirror, with Bessie almost mournfully watching herself. It’s a spellbinding moment that stings, underscored by the feeling of the inevitable -- that this cannot last. That goes for Bessie's sense of stability as well as the scene's artistry; the latter is a luxury that Bessie too rarely offers.

That the movie so instantaneously turns to the family unit’s collapse is indicative of its problems throughout. It’s simply confounding as to why these transcendent individual moments are so often compressed and secondary to the surrounding action. As with the Ma Rainey-Bessie Smith story of the film's first act, this tragic recounting of Bessie's familial construction is beyond ripe for its own cinematic treatment. 

We just don’t get enough of the good stuff within this sweeping, time-marking approach. The idyllic domestic life immediately, violently falls apart, and the movie promptly settles back into its glossy rhythms before a sweetened conclusion. Such a progression profoundly undermines the film's careful work in sketching out Bessie's inalterable flaws as a human being. (That Bessie, in real life, would die suddenly shortly thereafter hangs in the background as well.)

Perhaps this is Bessie’s ultimate downfall. It can never decide if it’s about a person or an icon. Selma and others like Lincoln prove you can fuse the two approaches, but Bessie alternates between reverence and despair, not unlike Ray or Walk the Line. This is a better movie than those latter two, as its disdain for melodrama gives way to generous authenticity. And there are achingly raw moments here to spare. But holistically, Bessie is a messy affair that can never get off the ground. It’s a standard biopic, as flawed as Bessie Smith herself and a far cry away from the greatness she’d achieve.

Grade: B-