Like an ice cream shop that offers you a choice of pistachios or strawberries and nothing else, the movies Tyler Perry has been making for 20 years come in only two flavors: comedy and soap opera. It’s worth noting, in this case, how the flavors blend. Most often, they are stacked next to each other, as when Madea suddenly rushes into the middle of a dramatic scene. There is, however, a way that the saucy and astounding breadth of Berry’s comedy turns the drama into being more of an over the top. That’s why his movies are all a piece even when you’re all over the place. They feed you pistachios and strawberries, and by the time everything melts together, you taste one flavor. He named it Tyler Perry with Nuts.
It all makes “A Jazzman’s Blues,” which premiered last night at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a Tyler Perry movie with a new flavor. Set in the rural community of Hopewell, Georgia in the late 1930s and 1940s, the film is a sprawling tale of forbidden love, art, ambition, deep racial hatred, and black people passing white, a theme the film addresses. An emotional explosion that I thought was lacking in Rebecca Hall’s “pass”. It’s also a murder mystery, although in this case the mystery isn’t so much a murder as what caused that tragedy.
A Jazzman’s Blues is overflowing with melodrama, but it’s not Organized Widely. It’s akin to Berry’s version of Douglas Sirk, the movie that takes a love story and augments it until complications grow and twist around like vines. Berry publicized the fact that the script was written 27 years ago (it was, in fact, the first script he ever wrote); After he was done, he put it in a drawer and kept it there. But the years have been kind to this scenario. “A Jazzman’s Blues” has the feel of a fine vintage wine for something deep, rich, refreshing, and earthy.
In 1987, a package of old letters was delivered to the Georgia attorney general as evidence in a 40-year-old murder case. The film then goes back to 1937, when Bayou (Joshua Boone), a late teen from a family of musicians, meets the proud, light-skinned Leanne (Sulia Pfeiffer). Bayou, an amateur jazz singer, seems sensitive enough to need someone’s protection. He’s alarmingly reluctant, overshadowed by a tough mother (Princess Fan) who is a washing machine woman (and a good singer too), despised by his trumpet-playing father (E. Roger Mitchell) and domineering older brother Willie Earl (Austin Scott).
Does this innocent, defeated child have what it takes to do a play for love? It looks like it might be way too sensitive. But Leanne sends a kite flying in his window every night to signal that they should meet. They do so near an oak tree covered in Spanish moss, where she teaches him to read and discover that they belong together. They have the kind of old cinematic connection that feels not just romantic, but spiritual. It’s just love he is.
However, Leanne has dark secrets that make her more vulnerable than she looks, especially when her violent mother is around. After Bayou proposes and kisses Lian, the mother reacts by taking the girl away in the north. Bayo writes her letters, but they are not answered (intercepted). And when Leanne returned, in 1947, she was married – to a white man who believed she was white.
Berry is the rare filmmaker who understands the politics of black and white as it has been played out in the kitchens and saloons of the South, in communities that have been separated between homes and huts and yet still have all kinds of interaction. Lian’s departure gives her a window into the white world and some ugly things that she would never have seen in it. It also makes the movie a secret agent suspense. So when Bayou and Leanne rekindle their relationship, because they can’t stop themselves, we feel in danger. This is love mixed with elemental nitroglycerin.
We also note that Bayou is no longer the sunflower it was before. Joshua Boone puts in a great performance that develops before our very eyes. However, the more Bayou trusted, the more love seemed to move away from him. Forced to leave Hopewell when he is falsely accused of whistling at Leanne (the same accusation that would have spurred the extrajudicial murder of Emmett Till in 1955), he travels with his brother to Chicago, where they audition for a white-only supper club (where black entertainment ).
Bayou became the signature attraction, crooning standards with the softness of Nat King Cole’s smile. But Willie Earl, sent to the band with his trumpet, begins drowning himself in bitterness and heroin. “A Jazzman’s Blues” intentionally blends black experiences with a kind of studio system ingenuity. The musical sequences, which range from loud blues to beautifully orchestrated club parties (with rotating choreography by Debbie Allen), are exhilarating. They give the movie a soulful pulse and make you wish Perry would direct an all-out musical.
Perry enjoys melodrama, but by rooting these mature relationships within a clear-eyed historical setting, he keeps us engaged in a lively way we’re not used to in his films. A Jazzman’s Blues shows you that Berry, in theory, could have been an entirely different kind of director (although if that was the case, it’s doubtful he would have been just as popular or powerful). That’s something I felt when I saw his TV work – shows like “The Haves and the Have Nots,” which cast a much more sophisticated and more complex spell than what his films do. Where films can seem strung together, here he draws us in with a slow, unforgiving passion, building a story of love and violence on the dual currents of social reality and destiny. A Jazzman’s Blues may be based on an old script, but to Perry it feels like the beginning of something new.
[ad_2]
