Nearly walked out of that.
I so wanted to like that. Joseph Bologne’s life is so interesting, it would make such a good movie. It still would.
It’s American, so you know it’s gonna obvious and heavy-handed as fuck, but Jesus, some of that was unwatchable.
I’m gonna try and be fair and say what was good as well as bad about that film. The good is a short list, the start middle and end of which is Kelvin Harrison who fights the paint-by-numbers script to give a genuinely dedicated performance.
As for the bad… Phfffffft. The dialogue is definitely the worst. Just painful. Characters don’t speak, they narrate. And it’s all the time, from the tiniest interaction, of bullies beating Joseph as a schoolboy and feeling the need to proclaim, “Hit him! Hit him!” to having Marie Antionette say, “I am the queen”. Like we have eyes, it’s not radio, you’re adding nothing by just saying what you see out loud.
Every choice in this is the most obvious choice. The film starts with basically 3 scenes of pseudo dick-measuring contests back-to-back. We get to see smarmy and arrogant racists go up against Joseph, then he beats them at their own game, while being just as smarmy and arrogant. This is supposed to make us like him. It’s juvenile. And you just lurch from one scene hammering you over the head with a self-evident point to the next.
And it’s a real shame, because it seems to have a lot of the right pieces. It’s important that this Black man’s story is told by a Black director and Black writer, but more than that, incredibly talented people in their field. It’s written by Stefani Robinson, who writes for the What We Do In The Shadows tv show, which I love, and has received multiple Emmy Award nominations for that work. And directed by Stephen Williams, who is a solid pair of hands. But none of that seems to come together successfully.
If it was even just bad, I’d say good story, not well executed. But I actually sat with my head in my hands, trying to go somewhere else, during some of these scenes. It wasn’t just cringingly bad, it was bail on the whole endeavour level of bad. And having forced myself to stay and see it all, in order to not just judge it by its first 5 minutes, which were frankly enough to know what kinda time I was in for, I have to say I regret it, coz I could have been outside eating a sandwich.