Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch One Night in Miami.
SHE SAW
Greg used baby wipes to try to remove stains from the shirts he was ironing during our at-home screening of One Night in Miami. It was very distracting not just because of the inefficacy of baby wipes for stain removal but also because the packet was obnoxiously crackly - worse than a bag of barley sugars in a silent cinema - and don't get me started on the deafening expulsions of steam.
It was particularly grating because the performances in this film are exceptional and I was trying to pay close attention to the nuances each of the actors brought to the characters Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown. I am unhealthily familiar with the work of Leslie Odom Jr (Cooke) having fallen into a Hamilton (the musical) rabbit hole for a good portion of last year, but all the lead actors - Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree and Aldis Hodge - deliver captivating performances, which never cross over into caricature. In her feature film directorial debut, Oscar-winning actress Regina King proves she has a talent for getting the most out of her actors.
Adapted from Kemp Powers' play, One Night in Miami is a fictionalised account of a real night in which the four aforementioned men spend an evening in a motel room celebrating Cassius Clay's defeat of Sonny Liston. The stage play format is omnipresent throughout the film, which is dialogue-heavy, and you can almost see the stage directions on screen: Sam Cooke exits stage left. In that way, it is a bit claustrophobic and I found my interest piqued the few times they left the motel room. Greg agreed, but thought our concordance on that point made us sound like big dumb-dumbs, lamenting a lack of explosions and car chases. He's right. There's a purpose to the feeling of cabin fever as it relates to the black experience. It's necessarily oppressive.