The Six Triple Eight

 

Tyler Perry's The Six Triple Eight takes an inspiring story of the crucial role Black women in the Army Corps played during World War II and cleaves it into two unequal parts. 

The first part is a romance between an African American high school student living near Philadelphia and her "secret" Jewish boyfriend (the beauteous Ebony Obisidian and dreamy Gregg Sulkin, respectively). This being the '40s and Perry being Perry, their relationship is more of a chaste abstraction in the film, so the boyfriend's death on the battlefield, which devastates young Lena, feels as remote as the shores of France. We've seen little of the ardor they claim to feel for each other, and a scene of the two at a social gathering where she is part of the wait staff and he an invited guests doesn't serve the grounding purpose I think is intended by Perry, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Hymel. 

The second part is a more fulfilling story of defiance and dignity, as Kerry Washington's Captain Charity Adams takes command of a ragtag group of female enlistees, young Lena among them, and turns them into a force to be reckoned with. Despite Adams' insistence that the women under her command can do more than work switchboards and prepare meals, her superior officers deny her requests at every turn, sometimes in stark, racists terms -- until a task they are convinced is beyond the  ken of Black women arises. The generals are certain the Black WACs will fail, Adams disgraced and the notion of equality scuttled.

The matter at hand? Letters to and from the battlefield are not being delivered. Rather, they're being stored in hangars where they are subject to the elements and rodents. Morale among service members is suffering, which undermines the war effort. Both President Roosevelt and the First Lady (Sam Waterston and Susan Sarandon) demand something be done.

Though the two parts of film are intertwined -- young Lena is inspired to join the ranks to "fight Hitler" after her beau goes missing -- it's the mobilization of the women to take charge of a seemingly impossible task that carries the greater weight and importance for me, despite Perry's signature speechifying and sass. 

The scenes of the Six Triple Eight's transformation into a logistics powerhouse are stirring, and Washington is a formidable actress and presence. Despite some narrative weaknesses, the pictures carries and delivers a message that is valuable, and timely, considering recent events, about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of searing doubt and stifling disrespect.

Queer

 

Luca Guadagnino's sweaty and smoky adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer might strike some as oddly retro in subject matter, considering the amount of LGBTQ+ themed film and television content being produced now. But this fever dream of stifled desires strikes familiar notes in different ways.

Burroughs' story tells of William Lee, a drunken junkie writer in Mexico in the 1950s, and his obsession with a younger ex-Navy man of opaque sexuality, Eugene Allerton. It stars Daniel Craig as the boozy and blistered Lee and Drew Starky (Outer Banks) as Allerton.

Craig trimmed a bit of his famous James Bond musculature for the role of the anxious intellectual in linen and fedora searching for love (or its approximate) in all of the wrong places. Though he doesn't look like he would have any trouble in that respect, Lee wears misery like a cheap suit. He finds solace with a coterie of equally verbose lonely hearts, primarily his friend Joe (a plump Jason Schwartzman in good form), with whom he frequents the local watering holes to trade gossip.

For his part, Starky's Allerton presents an inscrutable figure: his bearing is ramrod straight, spit and polish, and he keeps company with a local woman but doesn't shut down Lee's pursuit of him. He gives little away, aside from tales of his military exploits. He seems to be innocently oblivious at times, and at other times, cagey and cruel.

This uncertainty only fuels Lee's desire to explore a rumored jungle plant that supposedly enhances human telepathy, which might help him make fulfilling human connections. Though he seems impervious to ridicule, it's clear that he wants more out of life, though what that would be in its totality, like so much else in this picture, is not apparent.

Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) is an exacting director with an eye for environmental detail. When the story takes Lee and Allerton into the jungles near Quito, Ecuador, in search of a botanist (Lesley Manville), the heat and primordial vegetation press in, just like Lee's lonely desperation. It's stifling.

But with the help of herbal hallucinogens, Lee's anxiety takes flight, and the audience accompanies him in the last quarter of the picture on a lengthy trip that finally offers the realization that maybe what's in front of us is all there is. This table, this drink, this friend, this day.

The Piano Lesson

Netflix's 2024 adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson is a family affair, both within the story world and behind the camera.

Directed by Malcolm Washington, one of Denzel Washington's sons, The Piano Lesson stars John David Washington, Malcolm's brother and high-wattage screen performer, and was produced by their father.

Set in Wilson's beloved Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson is part of the American Century Cycle, ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, that tell stories of Black life among the African American diaspora, mostly in Wilson's neighborhood, the Hill District. 

The plays are expansive and poetic, many bridging the gulf between history and myth, incorporating large passages of monologue and memory. Though varied in focus and execution, the plays are all robust representations of Wilson's view of the American experience, a mix of drama and comedy, realism and fantasy, dreams realized and deferred. They are hugely important parts of the country's theatrical and literary history. 

(Denzel Washington has appeared in several Century Cycle productions and has committed to adapting Wilson's work for the screen.)

The Piano Lesson, first staged in 1986 and filmed for television in 1995, is set in 1936 and tells the story of the Charles family, whose members have gradually moved from the segregated South to Pittsburgh. Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) is the patriarch of the family home that he shares with his niece, Berniece, (Danielle Deadwyler) and her young daughter, Maretha, (Skylar Aleece Smith). They are visited one night by Berniece's brother Boy Willie (Washington) and  a family friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher). 

Boy Willie and Lymon have driven a truck filled with watermelons to sell in hopes of raising part of the money Boy Willie needs to buy land once owned by former slavers.  He means to stay in Mississippi, despite the hardships, and farm the land.  Boy Willie wants to get the rest of the money by selling a cherished piano that was engraved by their grandfather with images of the enslaved family members. The piano was taken from the slave owners 25 years before and moved with the family to Pittsburgh.

Berniece reveres the instrument, even though she refuses to play it, prizing the memories it contains. Her brother sees it as a wasted opportunity, and most of the play, which is set mainly in the living room and kitchen of Doaker's house, is the battle of wills between the siblings, which, in turn, represents the tension between the Black past and Black future, both haunted, literally, by spirits of injustice and pain.

The performances in Malcolm Washington's adaptation of Wilson's staging are superb, with Jackson, Deadwyler and John David Washington solidly delivering the emotional peaks and valleys of this stirring and punishing study of a family struggling with their individual and collective identities. 

Highly Recommended.