Director: Tina Mabry
Writers: Gina Prince-bythewood, Tina Mabry, Edward Kelsey Moore
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Sanaa Lathan, Uzo Aduba
Synopsis: Follows a trio of best friends known as “The Supremes” who, together for decades, have weathered everything through marriage and children, happiness and blues.
Unfortunately, films that are divided between two timelines rarely make a fair link between both. How can they? When times like the ‘60s are a myriad of flipped bobs, satin dresses, local teen gathering spots, hand-written menus, vintage jukeboxes, and soda fountains while the ‘90s have…the characters growing older and more period-accurate chic. In The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, costumes and set design thrive where narrative and tonal shifts fail. It’s like two entirely different films glued together, that even great performances from both the teen and mature cast can’t save its face.
The film is about three women, as they transition into adulthood during the ‘60s. Eventually, they reap the bitter outcomes of a prejudiced adulthood, dictated by racism, misogyny, and generational trauma in the ‘90s. Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is the salty, sassy outspoken gun-blazing girl of the group, Barbara Jean (Sanaa Lathan) is the traumatic survivor of physical abuse -an underdeveloped storyline that could’ve had a major impact on the film had it been further explored- and Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the passionate, driven artist, with big hopes and dreams for a future crushed by unfair, discriminative treatment of talent.
The film succeeds in creating a bond between the three leads. All the actresses playing the characters in both stages have done a seriously great job. But acting alone can’t save the film’s melodramatic inconsistency, not to mention how some side stories have taken trite storytelling routes that are less compelling than they intended.
One of the highlights of the film is a criminally underdeveloped storyline, and that’s Barbara Jean’s trauma bonding with Ray (Julian McMahon), both two abused kids who find each other at a moment in time when they are slowly starting the healing process from the trauma. They are an interracial couple, Ray is white, and Barbara Jean is black, but their similarities overshadow their differences. This has been the most interesting storyline in the film other than the bond between the three women and their unexpected friendship, and it deserved a spotlight, a bigger opportunity to be explored and stretched further, given more complex dimensions and deeper analysis.
Another underdeveloped element in this period-piece drama is Earl’s restaurant itself. This magical place where all the troubled and the weary seek refuge, Uncle Earl (Tony Winters) being this surrogate father figure to all the young ones, and yet the place gets the least attention in the movie. The set design is wonderful, but the place is not touched on to become another iconic film cafe or restaurant, which film buffs hunt and immortalize in writings and social media. It could’ve used a lot of personalization work to make this fictional place even more iconic.
Now for one of the most fun parts of the film, costumes. Costume designer Whitney Anne Adams excels in crafting a varied difference between the ‘60s ambitious girl trying to craft her sense of style and identity to the ‘90s woman reveling in luxury but also in grounded wisdom of a woman who has known for long who she is and the sacrifices she had to make to reach the stage she is in. Bright colors mature into jewel tones, but a color palette for a particular character stays with them, and slight changes reflect their shifting journeys, good or bad.
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is a cozy movie that relies too hard on nostalgia bait, but where it thrives in performances it lacks in world-building and narrative consistency. It is a fun watch, but for it to be an endearing homage to ‘90s black melodramas like Soul Food and Waiting to Exhale, it would have benefited from a more compressed runtime, and fewer events taking place throughout its course.
