Mark Reviews Movies: A JAZZMAN'S BLUES

A Jazzman's Blues, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2022

The earnestness with which writer/director Tyler Perry approaches A Jazzman's Blues prevents this messy, unfocused narrative from becoming a complete disaster. It begins as a straightforward murder mystery of sorts, although with a bit of a twist. In the late 1980s, an older woman (whose age becomes a major sticking point if one gives it a second thought once the full truth is revealed) walks from her remote cabin outside a small town in Georgia and into the office of a local government official. She, a Black woman, wants this politician, a white man with higher ambitions and plenty of not-too-secret racist beliefs, to investigate a murder that took place about 40 years ago.

It's a fine enough start and one that suggests plenty to come to surface beyond the identity of a dead man, the circumstances of his death, and the mystery of who could have killed him. Perry isn't a subtle filmmaker, and that trait could serve him well in this story, which immediately connects the ugly scab of more modern racism with the open wound on this country that it was within living memory. Given the time period and the setting of the Deep South, the circumstances of the murder of a young man nicknamed Bayou (Joshua Boone) will come as little surprise, but Perry seems to go against his creative instincts when it comes to that aspect of this story.

Indeed, the fact of Bayou's impending fate is almost forgotten as soon as it has been established in the flash-forward prologue. To be sure, Perry lays out a bunch of possibilities as to what specific doom will befall this man. That, though, ends up making this simple story feel far too busy and much too much a distraction from the harsher realities and the thorny relationship the present has with the past that Perry clearly wants to examine here. With the story's booked scenes, such notions end up coming across as a gimmicky setup and an afterthought.

Mostly, Perry's screenplay establishes a string of melodramatic setups, payoffs, and disappointments. The last part is especially true when it comes to the movie's more potentially complex characters and conflicts.

The primary ones are fairly simple. Bayou begins as a 17-year-old who never learned to read and whose talents are hidden from everyone, including his supportive mother Mattie Mae (Amirah Vann) and especially his insulting father (played by E. Roger Mitchell). The parents are musicians—her a singer and him a guitarist. While that talent has been passed to his trumpet-blowing brother Willie Earl (Austin Scott), it seems have passed by Bayou. That's until Leanne (Solea Pfeiffer), a young woman about his age who has moved in with her nearby grandfather, hears Bayou singing.

This quickly becomes a sincerely romantic and ultimately star-crossed love story between Bayou and Leanne. It's all moody nighttime meetings and kisses against the sunrise, until the sexually abusive grandfather learns about the couple and has Leanne's mother Ethel (Lana Young) move the girl to Boston. Years pass (Bayou joins the Army, but his shortened time there makes it seem as if Perry didn't want to devote the time or money to war scenes), and Leanne returns to the small town. She, now passing as white, is married to the brother of the local Sheriff (played by Brad Benedict), but Bayou is still in love with her.

Obviously, Leanne is the most complex character here—a woman pressured by her mother and herself to deny and, as suggested when she slaps the family maid Citsy (Milauna Jemai Jackson), possibly hate her identity. In the end, she's little more than a plot device, though, to get Bayou into trouble and force him to leave town. He joins his brother and Willie Earl's manager Ira (Ryan Eggold), a Holocaust survivor (just to add to the many, many ideas that Perry touches upon but leaves unexplored in any meaningful way), on a trip to Chicago, where he—a pretty lackluster performer, if we're being honest—becomes a singing sensation.

By the time Bayou nears the end of his story, a lot of people—the Sheriff, his brother, Leanne's mother, even his own heroin-addicted and jealous brother—want him dead. The whole scheme of the plot, which hints so many intriguing ideas about race and history, seems to exist, not to examine those plentiful ideas, but to keep us wondering who will finally act upon those hateful feelings. A Jazzman's Blues finally seems more like a guessing game than anything else, and within the scope of the movie's final horrors and modern-day ramifications, the method of Perry's narrative approaches—and, for some, might cross —distastefulness.

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