Writing in the New York Times last year, critic A.O. Scott argued that “[w]hat is often missing from” musician biopics “is any real insight into the reason we might be interested in the first place, which is the music. We might see our idol more or less persuasively impersonated by a hard-working actor, strumming a guitar or noodling at a piano, but the complicated labor of creativity is notoriously hard to show on screen.”
Nina, the new film that launched dozens of think pieces, editorials, and an online petition to stop its production, is no different. In fact, considering its subject—the revolutionary, provocative Nina Simone—and the rarity with which we see such kinds of films about black female musicians, it likely stands as one of the most egregious examples of how the genre can go wrong. Through its (white) director, Cynthia Mort, and a drastically made up Zoe Saldana, the long-gestating project blatantly misunderstands the fundamental significance of her music as the sign, symbol, and sound of collective struggle—and thus fundamentally misunderstands her blackness.
A long line of black studies music philosophers, including Fred Moten, have shown the ways that “blackness” is a historical and material condition that has generated and shaped a tradition of sound responding to and playing through tumultuous social and political changes and absorbs, manages, and defies historical catastrophes. Mort’s film is bereft of this sort of philosophy. The very makeup applied to Saldana to suggest that we read her as Simone is a sign of how little this director thinks of “blackness” as anything more than prosthetic, something that can be “slipped on” and “into,” something with no significant weight or substance.
The amateurishness of Mort’s approach to her subject is especially apparent in its use of 1965’s “Four Women,” recorded the same year that the infamous Moynihan Report was released, which, in part, pathologized single black mothers and lay the blame upon black women for the socio-economic crises plaguing the black community. Many have read this song as a kind of radical riposte to that document, one of the first popular culture explorations of the transgenerational, racial, gendered, sexual, and class exploitation of black women in American culture. In Nina, Mort gives us two instances of that song’s meaningfulness as it relates to Simone’s black female fans, and one comes late in the film. In one of those moments of suggestive healing, the artist receives a tape recording from a young woman who sings the song back to her as an acknowledgement of the gifts passed down to her by her late mother. Along with a brief scene in which we see the musician sharing her anthem “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” with playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry we get glimpses of what could have been a much more groundbreaking film, one in which black women were listening to each other and setting each other free. (Interestingly, this scene, while powerful, is actually fictionalized by Mort—Hansberry’s untimely death in 1965 was, in part, a catalyst for Simone to write the song.) Yet neither reference to “Four Women” probes Simone’s inspiration for writing the song in the first place, let alone the specific challenges she faced as a black woman artist in a white male–dominated recording industry.
Elsewhere, Saldana’s “Simone” remains heartbreakingly divorced from her brethren in ways that run antithetical to her art and politics. Nina focuses almost entirely on the title character in isolation, far removed from family and community late in her career (living the expat’s life in the South of France). More still, it is telling that the film folds together and recreates excerpts from two of the most well-known filmed interviews with the musician but excises what is arguably one of the most famous quotes from either of these clips. Decked out in a chic, French Riviera–style wide-brimmed hat seen in one of those interviews, Saldana as Simone ruminates on the meaning of freedom to her, offering the remark that it stands for “no fear.” The line itself is taken from a separate interview that director Liz Garbus uses to open her 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? (an infinitely better film). Fans familiar with this material will know that the artist went well beyond the sound bites included in Nina, however. From the former interview:
I think what you’re trying to ask is why am I so insistent upon giving out to them that BLACK-ness, that BLACK power, that BLACK pushing to identify with black culture … I have no choice over it … to me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world—black people. And I mean that in every sense, outside and inside. And to me we have a culture that is surpassed by no other civilization but we don’t know anything about it, so … my job is to somehow make them curious enough or persuade them by hook or crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from … and to bring it out … This is what compels me to compel them, and I will do it by whatever means necessary.
Leaving this remarkable declaration—or any other equally bold statement from Simone about loving, defending, and celebrating blackness—out of Nina effectively ahistoricizes Saldana’s Simone and dilutes the political potency of her deepest aspirations. To be free of “fear” in this film is about being free of one’s own demons, rather than the larger demons oppressing an entire people and black women in particular. Fear is disconnected from the long history of socio-political terror of which Simone famously sang in her 1963 protest anthem “Mississippi Goddam” (which also receives only passing reference here). That Simone’s own concise, forthright revolutionary vision of her art’s purpose is absent from this film is an insult greater than all the bad wigs and 50 shades of black caked onto Saldana.
Yet Nina’s most fundamental problem and the most jarring exemplification of its missing blackness is that of Saldana’s vocal aesthetic. When it comes to portraying Simone, it would take an extremely astute and gifted director (and equally insightful actor) who is steeped in black study to recognize that what her lead must do is to sing not with proficiency but with a knowing and daringly audible recognition of the long black diasporic freedom struggle across the centuries. Simone’s unmistakable voice is rooted in that tradition and sounds it out at every turn, evoking what black music critic Nathaniel Mackey has—riffing on Federico García Lorca—described as duende, a “dark sound” in the voice that has little to do with technical virtuosity but everything to do with that which is “troubling.” Duende, he argues, “has to do with trouble, deep trouble.”
Saldana’s renditions of the Simone song archive are pleasant rather than trouble and troubling, Disney princess meets American Idol competency—rather than righteous fire, heat, rage, and eloquence. Simone’s contralto was a lower frequency that conjured the sound of her lived, black American experience and functioned as both a weapon for her people as well as a tool to affirm self-love. It celebrated that which her fellow avant-garde musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk called blacknuss, an indelible sound that has been described as “anthemic testimony” to the complexities of black life in America. Saldana’s smooth, mellifluous tone is the sound of a world that forgot who Nina Simone was and why she mattered. It is the sound of music robbed of its historical and political urgency, and that remains the greatest travesty of all.
Read more about Nina in Slate:
