Honeydripper (2007 - John Sayles)
Set in 1950 Alabama, John Sayles' latest is a fine crowd-pleasing piece that much like the title club sadly isn't drawing any crowds. Danny Glover stars as Tyrone Purvis, "Pinetop" to his friends. He's a good Blues piano player who has given up the road for a little piece of something he can call his own, a small club for Black folks outside of a spot on the map called Harmony, Alabama. As the film opens he's close to losing it. The rival juke joint across the way doesn't even bother with live music, and even though he has aging traditional Blues queen Bertha Mae (played by real-life R&B singer Mable John) as his regular headliner, the young people would rather hear the newer kind of Blues cranking from his rival's jukebox. Pinetop has exhausted his credit for liquor and everything else, and unless he can clear a few hundred dollars this upcoming weekend he'll lose his lease as well. His best friend Maceo (Charles S. Dutton), his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and step daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) are all there to help, but the chances of business survival are looking slim. Pinetop has a last gasp solution; he's sent his last fifty dollars to the manager and promised three times as much to a popular rising radio star from New Orleans, an electric guitar player known as Guitar Sam. Maybe, just maybe, one great Saturday night with Guitar Sam as the attraction will bring in enough money to hold everybody off for another week or month?
Pinetop also has to contend with a gangster's muscle (Tom Wright) sent to collect the rent money due bright and early Sunday morning and the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) who is tired of Pinetop's independence and being about the last business, certainly the last Black-owned business, that doesn't grease his palm for the privilege of not being shut down. Also new in town is a young wanna-be guitar player named Sonny (present day Austin Blues sensation Gary Clark, Jr.) who is wandering from backwater town to backwater town trying to get his first break if he doesn't land in jail for vagrancy first.
Not much of what transpires in
Honeydripper plot-wise will be much of a surprise, including the big Saturday night show and the new star that emerges to save the day, but the characters and the world Sayles and company create are such a joy to behold it hardly matters. Glover has his best lead role in over a decade and the entire cast is perfect. I particularly loved Keb' Mo' as a sort of Blind Boy Williamson meets Jimminy Cricket and Vondie Curtis-Hall as Bertha Mae's husband, but there isn't a false note in the company from the lead roles to the smallest supporting players. Sayles doesn't fill the story with nearly as many subplots this time as his pieces often have, and it examines some of the same themes from
Lone Star in a more simple and gentle way, but for the pure enjoyment factor this one had me all the way, an American Myth created by a great cinematic storyteller. I'd compare it to Robert Altman's Southern comedy
Cookie's Fortune in that regard (and not just because both feature Roc Dutton), because while neither film is among the most complete or complex of their careers you just can't deny how much fun they are. I just love Sayles' sensibilty and his writing. The lament Pinetop has about the apocryphal Slave who must have been the first Black piano player, that alone is worth the price of admission for me. Sayles' lowkey sense of humor always cracks me up too, as when Sonny rolls off of the box car and enthusiastically decides a town called Harmony is the perfect place for a young musician to have stumbled upon and the Black station attendant tells him, "The only night I ever spent in jail was in a town called Liberty. When the sun rises tomorrow, you'll see where you've landed." Great stuff. That none of the songs John Sayles co-wrote for the film, including "China Doll" and "Music Keeps Rollin' On", were nominated for Best Original Song is a damn shame. I wish the public at large would find
Honeydripper, but like just about every John Sayles movie it is destined to be loved rabidly by a relatively small number of people. We're the lucky ones.
GRADE: B+
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