When Phylicia Rashad appears to play the role of a mother grieving her son, a college friend of Coates’ whom police killed years ago, it’s difficult to see anyone else trying it. For example: Bassett on the futility of the “American Dream” is thoroughly commanding, Ali on falling in love is downright mesmerizing, and executive producer Susan Kelechi Watson is very compelling in her portion on Howard University (Coates’ “Mecca”). And yet it’s even harder to imagine which speakers should get cut, as nearly all convincingly ground themselves in the material. There’s something lost in this translation between page and screen that depends upon this many performers their interpretations are still powerful, but immediately more scattered, and it’s hard not to wonder if a more pared down version might have been even more effective. The fact that Coates’ book takes care to remind his son that their experiences don’t run parallel to those of the Black women surrounding them doesn’t factor in here, as many Black women take on his words as their own. It takes a minute to adjust to watching so many different speakers, each filmed in August in their own homes thanks to COVID-19 protocols, delivering different stages of the same story ostensibly from the same perspective.
As performed in this televised version by well over a dozen actors (plus activist Angela Davis), Coates’ story necessarily flattens into something broader and more diffuse.
After all, he’s far from the only Black father watching his son absorb the world, in all its baffling hostility. “You have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect…you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.”Īs written, Coates’ visceral, furious fear is both extremely personal and widely applicable. “This was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death,” he writes in the opening pages.
When Coates first decided to write “Between the World and Me” as a letter to his 15 year-old son, the news was reporting yet another endless cycle of all too familiar stories.
Directed by Kamilah Forbes of New York City’s Apollo Theater, with archival montages and gorgeous cinematography by Bradford Young, this visual version of “Between the World and Me” is as dense and vast as the book that inspired it. Coates’ recollections, heartbreaks and historical conclusions become monologues performed to the camera by actors like Angela Bassett, Mahershala Ali and Oprah Winfrey herself taking on his prose like a solemn mantle. By the time Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks in HBO’s adaptation of “Between the World and Me,” his words have already been voiced by a starry cadre of Black talent.
0 kommentar(er)
