Chadwick Bosman’s great performance – Variety Var

Chadwick Bosman is a great actor. There is no need to discover anything else in this world. Yet a funny thing happens whenever I have a conversation about him. I always ask the person I’m talking to if they see a “get up”, and the answer is inevitable, that is, “No, I missed it.” It never fails to amaze me, because it’s Bosman’s most tragic and great performance. He played James Brown, Pompeo, an electric sold-out dreamer who revolutionized the world of music (and the wider world), and the first thing about Bosman’s performance was that you were forced to reach out to him to describe it in the fifth answer biopic troupe: In “Get Up Up”, Bosman doesn’t just play James Brown – he channels him.

But the second thing is: How to channel James Brown?

He was the power of nature. No one looked like him, spoke like him, or moved like him; His tight wired forgetfulness was a hurricane of his own. So how can an actor if you imitate iconic methods Turned James Brown?

Bosman does that. Surprisingly, he nailed the rice – the way Brown would roll and shake and pinch and tear to pieces, as if dancing on hot coals. Bosman Offsetge does a completely miraculous job of capturing Brown’s cackling knowledge, telling the whole sentence in one word, a cool aura with which each face turns into a chess game, in which he leads the three forward people he reads.

There is a fun sequence that Brown will appear on the USO tour of Vietnam in the morning. The open-backed military plane they are on is shot down, but Brown is not as frightened as his band members (Brown to the pilot: “James Brown is dead! And I breathed. You didn’t catch me then, and certainly won’t call me now! “), And once they land, he harasses a USO officer who dares to apologize for the “aircraft problem.” (“Plane trouble? They’re trying to kill James Brown today! The man you killed Funk, do you want to go down in history?”). His voice is horrible, it contains a fair amount of crabs, that signature moves high and high, but the more the key to his mature locker rage is out of control, the more he controls every moment. As Bosman plays it, Brown’s personality is a series of masks that he wears to get what he wants.

“Get On Up”, released in 2014, was Tate Taylor’s first film after “Assistance” and it was a film where he pronounced his game and became a world-class filmmaker. It was my choice for the best movie of the year, and for good reason: it’s dramatic and entertaining, with a provocative musical pulse and as a script by Jazz and John-Henry Butterworth, it’s the most historically accurate of all biopics. (If you are in doubt, just watch Alex Gibbon’s terrific documentary “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown”)) A scene from the backstage at the Apollo Theater between James and his mother, who left him starring Viola Davis, will blow you away.

The movie was released late in the summer (it opened the same day as “Galaxy of the Galaxy”) and made $ 30 million at the box office, but Bosman’s position today is that I don’t think it’s worth fitting much now. . It’s a knockout of the film, which revolves around one of the best biopics of our time, starring untitled and transformed characters – “Ray,” Gaddy Oldman’s “Sid” and Nancy’s “Philip Seymour Hoffman”, “Capote,” or “What to Do with What’s Love”. Bassett.

The play is straightforward with a subtle level in time, so you can see how Brown’s upbringing pains both his parents in prison for stealing suit cases year after year – overshadowing everything he did, including Funk’s invention. His childhood was burned at the stake and it turned him into a single ship, a high-flying man who became a musical revolutionary, but also a petty tyrant, treating his band members as if they were under him (they were his friends, but he was their Fined for violations, re-practiced them on holidays, and ordered him to be called “Mr. Brown.”) The depiction of Brown’s cruelty is unmistakable. At the same time, it is a strikingly complex portrait – we see his ecstasy, his calculations, his violence, his showman’s intellect, his business acumen, his social awareness, his buried broken heart and the funny emotions he has created as a belief.

And it would be hard to imagine that a movie was dramatically made, this vivid, the intricate roots of African American popular music – how did Brown see the church with a passionate heroism, by the power of sin, by the joy of the gospel? , Surrounded by racial violence. In a surprising scene, as a child, he was in a white country club for entertainment, in a boxing ring, in the ribs, and while he was lying on the canvas, half-thrown, he corrected the sentence of a musical jazz band playing it and imagining it. Will turn into a cold, stiff, repetitive pattern. It’s born of fun – as music and as a kind of defensive weapon. It is a sequence that adds a simulcrum of meaning to the Brown Stage we see. His dance is very joyful, but part of his strength is that he turns evil around, overcoming it, and killing with his rice.

When “Get Up” was released, Bosman had only one big movie to his credit: “42,” where he established himself as a great actor by playing the character of Jackie Robinson. So when I recently saw “Get Up” (it was revisited for the first time since 2014), I was curious to see if Bosman’s performance would look different, since I’m so familiar with who he is now. He is a kind of subtle and intentional actor who takes his mind. This is the “Black Panther” (where he inspired a comic-book protagonist in the spirit of mitigation) and so in Spike Lee’s “The 5 Bloods” when he showed up in flashback, his intensity flared up. This part of the screen is Bosman’s personality. , An actor who has this dazzling chameleon, he is driven and provocative, with a touch of reserve. Where James Brown was a walking volcano, a Dionysian spirit.

But in “Get Up Up”, if Bosman doesn’t become Dionysius in a soul-field with his Apollonian Ara dam what we’re religious about James Brown here is not just music. It’s a sense of his destiny – his own destiny and a fun destination as the world’s new heartbeat. Funk is a revolution that overturned the rhymes of the rock ‘n’ roll (which is why it laid the foundations for disco and hip-hop). And in “Get Up Up,” Bosman’s James Brown angrily paraded Funk’s glory, making him one of the masters of the universe. Yet he is always aware of the structure he is elevating. Towards the end, there’s a montage to look back on, and for a moment we see James as a child, “I paid the price to beat the boss.” Accepts. As Bosman has played his character, he is a creator and a genius, a man who knew how to look good but took no captives, and the closest thing there is the real life superhero.