HONEYDRIPPER DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY JOHN SAYLESWITH DANNY GLOVER, CHARLES S. DUTTON, YAYA DACOSTA, GARY CLARK JR., LISA GAY HAMILTON, MABLE JOHN, STACY KEACH, VONDIE CURTIS-HALL, MARY STEENBURGEN, KEB’ MO’, AND SAYLES.
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The brief flashback in the middle of Honeydripper‘s climactic sequence is a good indication of how labored Sayles’s treatment of images continues to be. The flashback—it comes when Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis (Danny Glover) is about to break up a fight between a couple of angry customers in his Honeydripper Lounge—isn’t just clunky as visual storytelling and phony in its florid, bloody action and garish setting, it’s seriously underimagined. We get a sudden glimpse of Purvis as a young man pulling a knife on somebody in a fancy city club, suggesting that he gave up his career as a professional musician and retreated to the sticks to escape from the law after killing somebody. Now he’s a peacemaker persuading two hotheads to relinquish their weapons, but there’s no connection of the character to his cliched earlier self.
The movie’s uncommon pleasures derive not from any comprehensively created world but from its cast—mostly African-American veterans of the Broadway stage, of productions of August Wilson plays in particular—and Sayles’s graceful way of handling them. The plot is inspired by (rather than adapted from) “Keeping Time,” a Sayles story about a drummer published 15 years ago in Rolling Stone and collected in Dillinger in Hollywood. The story has more atmospherics than plot, but part of the movie’s narrative thread is derived from it. And not surprisingly, Sayles’s prose owes most of its energy to verbal riffs on black slang rather than to any abiding sense of lived experience.
Marginalizing Honeydripper means depriving mainstream audiences of mainstream entertainment. Glover’s as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, Dutton’s exchanges of sexual innuendo with an appreciative lady friend are delivered with a kind of relish verging on joy, and DaCosta and Clark make a cute couple. The music is a pleasure throughout. Keach and Mary Steenburgen turn in juicy performances—in fact, everybody on-screen seems to be enjoying themselves. So pretending that this is an art film just seems like a way of guaranteeing that some people who’d enjoy it won’t ever see it. v
