If you ask any of the major players involved in the making of the “disaster movie” that is Nina about the uproar over star Zoe Saldana’s drastic, racially charged makeup for the role, they’ll probably answer the way director Cynthia Mort did. In an interview with BuzzFeed, Mort said of the (not unfounded) accusations of blackface: “It’s hard to answer these questions, because this is a political debate and I’m not a politician, I’m a filmmaker. We did what we thought was right to tell the story.” And:
It’s a narrative film. You help your actor inhabit a character any way that you can. Just as Nicole Kidman put on Virginia Woolf’s nose, or Leo did his J. Edgar Hoover makeup … I understand the issue of race. And color is a sensitive issue. But at the same time, it is a movie. And it is an actor. And everyone is doing their best to find the truth in that.
In that same article writer Kate Aurthur pointed to past instances of Saldana addressing the issue in recent years. (Saldana declined to be interviewed for that story.) From a 2014 BuzzFeed interview with Jarett Wieselman:
I just hope that when the movie comes out, whoever sees it will appreciate that all of us came together to tell her story because nobody else was doing it. I don’t regret a second of it. Whatever backlash there is, I will take it like a man — no, like a woman, like an adult, and like an artist.
Well, after years of dread (Saldana’s casting in the role was first announced in 2012), I’ve finally seen Nina. And while I knew it would be impossible to enter a viewing of this film without bringing along all of the political and cultural baggage that’s accumulated around it, I really did try to look at it apart from all of that. (It was very difficult; even after having been exposed to Saldana’s face in stills and a trailer for months, it’s still jarring to stare at on a big screen, and for 90 minutes straight.) And so here I will attempt to do what its creators seem to want viewers to do, which is ignore its troubling casting choice and rather assess and “appreciate” Nina (which focuses primarily on her self-imposed exile from the United States in the 1990s while interspersing flashbacks to her earlier years) as a piece of art alone.
My takeaway: Nina is not a good movie. Its biggest issue as a film is that it strikes one simplistic note over and over again, and doesn’t seem to know where to go with it from there—that note being, Simone was a complex black woman. It starts off strong enough, referencing an event the real-life Simone would recount years later: the time an adolescent Nina played a concert for an audience of white folks and demanded that her parents be able to sit in the front row or else she wouldn’t play. In the next scene, a montage of newspaper clippings and magazine covers flies by to reveal that Nina, fed up with racism in America, has fled the country for good; a sit-down interview that plays out in bit parts throughout the entire film finds a candid Simone speaking about her struggle and love of blackness; the lyrics to one of her most famous songs, “Four Women,” are repeated in different contexts within the film (“My skin is black/ My arms are long/ My hair is wooly/ My back is strong”). And yet, Nina never truly tries to unpack these issues aside from giving them lip service—the turbulent, charged era of the ’60s and early ’70s is never truly evoked, and thus her position as a monumental political and cultural force is never really put into context.
A similar problem arises with the movie’s treatment of Simone’s mental health issues and relationship with Clifton Henderson—played by David Oyelowo, who you can tell is trying, helplessly, to make something out of this mess—a nurse who reluctantly becomes her assistant and later her manager, when she flees to France. We get scene after scene of Nina being volatile, primarily through his eyes—she’s testy, demanding champagne, throwing things, verbally abusing him. (When he refuses her sexual advances, she calls him a “faggot” and sends him to fetch a stranger for her from the bar in their hotel.) These moments plod on as the film progresses, but it’s never quite clear why Clifton stays around for as long as he does, and their relationship never feels as if it’s doing anything but going through all of the necessary dramatic beats. (To demonstrate a rare tender moment, which I guess is supposed to represent the out-of-nowhere breakthrough of their relationship, the movie resorts to a hackneyed move: Nina finds him sleeping on the couch and delicately covers him with a blanket.)
Much of the film’s incoherence could stem from the editing and butchering Mort alleges the producers did to the film. Some scenes end abruptly and awkwardly: There’s a bizarre, random scene in which a drugged up Richard Pryor (Mike Epps—who will, interestingly enough, play Pryor again in a biopic about the comedian) calls Nina up to reminisce about their early years that goes nowhere. Perhaps there was more to that scene than what ended up in the final cut? I suspect, however, that Nina’s failures as a compelling examination of the singer and activist are just as much a product of Mort’s script and direction. Outside of the slapdash race to get Simone to return to the states for a Central Park performance in that final act, there’s no real emotional journey to be had, no real understanding of what made her such an interesting figure, and thus, no reason for this movie to exist in the first place. You can detect this in Mort’s stated mission for what she hoped the film would be, as she told BuzzFeed: “She was an uncompromising artist. And that was my primary connection to her. I liked her activism, I liked her anger. I felt that she needed to be known for those reasons.”
We get the anger and we get a bit of the activism—and to be fair, Saldana’s also trying her best here, and is actually a pretty confident singer—but we just don’t get enough of the why. We don’t get what made her extraordinary. That recurring interview that’s interspersed throughout Nina, in which she just simply speaks her mind, is the closest the movie gets to really digging into her legacy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean much if you can just go and hear them straight from the mouth of Simone herself.
