Five minutes into the new Nina Simone biopic “Nina,” I was optimistic.
We are introduced to a 10-year-old child prodigy named Eunice Kathleen Waymon – played by child prodigy Vivie Eteme – a gangly, dark child with a round nose and big lips.
The whole town of Tryon, N.C. had come to see the piano genius perform for the first time. Standing at the back of the room are her parents, not allowed to sit up front to watch their daughter’s debut.
It was 1943 after all, and those seats were reserved for whites.
In her first public act of civil disobedience and assertion of black power and pride Eunice refuses to play until her parents are seated in their rightful place.
Once they are comfortable, Eunice’s nimble black fingers play beautifully.
Fast forward several years later, to those same hands on the piano. The music is still beautiful music, but the hands are older and now belong to Nina Simone.
Pan up to the recognizable face of Zoe Saldana.
Where the young Eteme was a splitting image of Simone, Saldana is not. Not a huge problem until you notice the makeup.
And it is hard not to notice how the brown-skinned Saldana was “blackened” to play the dark-skinned Simone.
Yes, in 2016, a movie that will be released this Friday features an actress in black-face.
My hopes were dashed, or as Simone might say: “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.”
Let me get this out of the way quickly – “Nina” is good and a lot of people associated with it know it.
In fact, moments after I attended an early-morning screening of the movie hosted by RLJ Entertainment and the African-American Film Critics Association, they gathered a bunch of critics in a huddle to explain away the mess.
But despite their good intentions, “Nina,” helmed by first time writer-director Cynthia Mort, was doomed to fail the moment it was announced.
It was doomed the moment it was announced that Saldana would play her.
It was doomed the moment the first production stills surfaced showing Saldana in ill-shaped wigs, uneven make-up and prosthetics to make her narrow nose wider.
Saldana is an accomplished actress. A name that played blue in "Avatar" and green in "Guardians of the Galaxy."
But you can’t go black to play Simone.
If you are familiar with Simone’s work, Saldana playing her in a movie was akin to "Safronia" portraying “Aunt Sarah.”
“Between two worlds/ I do belong,” Simone sang in “Four Women,” to describe the yellow Safronia.
Singing about Aunt Sarah, the imagery was starker: “My skin is black/My arms are long. My hair is woolly/My back is strong. Strong enough to take the pain/inflicted again and again.”
Simone might have been singing about herself.
I am embarrassed to say that I can’t recall having heard of Nina Simone until about 12 years ago.
I inherited a greatest hits album of the so-called “High Priestess of Soul,” a title she reluctantly accepted, and fell in love with it.
She was not as accessible or radio-friendly as Aretha, Chaka, Ella or Tina, but she was raw and unconventional.
I loved not only her sound, but what she was saying and singing about.
Simone wore her black skin and woolly hair like a badge of honor. And her looks, perhaps more than any artist before or since, defined Simone.
Which is why her fans are so protective of her image and music. And why they went ballistic over this film.
In 1966, according to Alan Light’s new biography, “What Happened, Miss Simone,” based on the brilliant Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name, Simone fully embraced wearing an afro because it identified her with Africa.
In Simone’s diaries and writings, she said the afro a clear rejection of the standards of white beauty.
“I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” Simone wrote. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time, wide open for them to jeer and approved of or disapprove of.”
So in Nina Simone, you have a woman who understood her blackness and embraced her image, being portrayed by someone forced to blacken up in an attempt to capture that same blackness and image that the artist understood so well.
I will resist the temptation of saying that someone like Viola Davis, Adepero Oduye or Uzo Aduba would have been a better fit to play Simone on the big screen.
Saldana is a good actress after all and if you strip away the makeup and wigs, she was not that bad.
Besides, Jeffrey Wright didn’t look like Martin Luther King Jr., yet gave one of the best performances of the civil rights leader by playing him straight in “Boycott.”
Some even balked at Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X, who was famously called “Red,” because of his ginger complexion.
But aside from getting his hair dyed, Washington didn’t change his physical appearance at all to play Malcolm X and should have won an Oscar for it.
Saldana actually might have been better off playing Simone in her natural state. It would have been far less distracting.
Back to the actual movie, the costumes are fabulous and everyone’s favorite, David Oyelowo(who played King in “Selma”) is understated (and wasted) as Simone’s brooding assistant and whipping boy Clifton Henderson.
But the film lacks a clear narrative as it painfully and humorlessly tries to tell the story of Simone’s descent into madness in the 1990s during her exile in France.
We meet a woman who is seriously messed up and a mean. She is a drunk, an addict and suffering from mental illness.
But the flashbacks, used brilliantly in biopics on Malcolm X and James Brown, never fully flesh out her story.
We never really understand how Nina became this mess and why she is so mad. We can guess, but we honestly don’t know.
We see her grab a gun after Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, before she writes a few bars of “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” her haunting tribute to him.
But we learn nothing about her active role as a civil rights activist (she performed "Mississippi Goddam" at a concert at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery March) and why King's death, which she said killed her inspiration, was so hard on her.
We hear briefly about her estranged daughter Lisa Simone Kelly, then flashback to a 30-second visit with the Kelly as a baby. Then Kelly (who has railed against the film) vanishes and is never hear from or seen again.
We see her get a random phone call from Richard Pryor, played by Mike Epps. Followed by a flashback of them playing a club in the Village in the 1960s. But you never understood what the point was.
Lorraine Hansberry, striped shirt and cigarette in hand, shows up briefly to be “Young, Gifted & Black,” then she is gone.
Nina Simone died in 2003 and will go down as one of the most conflicted and complicated figures in music and American history. It would have been a tough task to capture all of her in a movie.
This one it seems, didn’t even attempt it. If you want to know the real Simone, read Light’s book or better yet find the documentary on Netflix.
In the book and documentary that came before this movie was set to be released, the director and writer borrowed a line from Simone’s friend and artistic colleague Maya Angelou that might be apt in describing this movie, “What happened.”
“But what happened, Miss Simone,” Angelou wrote in 1970. “Specifically, what happened to your big eyes that quickly veil to hide the loneliness? To your voice that has so little tenderness, yet flows with your commitment to the battle of Life? What happened to you?”
Unfortunately, watching this movie, you never know.
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