Leslie Uggams triumphs over virtue-signaling.
In the wearyingly sarcastic Marvel Cinematic Universe flick Deadpool (2016), actress-singer Leslie Uggams made a career comeback playing Blind Al, the elderly black female cohort of the franchise’s irony-afflicted superhero (Ryan Reynolds). Uggams had been a pert civil-rights-era celebrity with Julliard and Broadway breakthroughs among her credits, and showed unsuspected depth as the tough, mistrusting slave Kizzy in the Seventies TV juggernaut Roots. None of this fazed Deadpool fans who naïvely accepted a white superhero’s blind, aged, profane black mammy-mentor as being progressive.
Uggams revives that irony in the new comedy Dotty & Soul, in which she plays Dorothy Jean Bolden, a multifaceted retiree who works as a snack-cart vendor in a Texas old folks’ home. Dotty’s history of personal travails gets exploited when a race-hustling go-getter, Ethan Cox (Adam Saunders, also the film’s writer-director), hires her to salvage his entrepreneurial scheme.
Ethan pitches his driverless-automobile company, Private Car, for a municipal transportation contract. (His prototype is a Rolls-Royce Phantom, announcing his hip-hop-based flash.) But after a white-boy social-media embarrassment, Ethan persuades Dotty to front his enterprise: “I need you to look the part.”
Dotty & Soul combines progressive ideology with box-office formula, echoing the race-based role-reversal joke of Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places (1984). Dotty is a comic figure of black resourcefulness as seen by a white liberal apologist. (“I believe you missed your calling,” everyone tells Dotty.) This is not the edgy comic radicalism of Robert Downey Sr.’s corporate satire Putney Swope. (Downey would surely have mentioned the babydaddy of Dotty’s biracial daughter, Isabella — played by Margot Bingham — who “unsettles” Ethan.)
Saunders’s scheme is sentimental, a heart-and-soul alliance of Jewish and black hustlers, but also moralizing: “It’s melanin, dude,” Dotty asserts. “You did something racist, so now you need my black face to save your white ass.” Dotty’s bluntness recalls Archie Bunker’s ethnic cynicism, which was over-pitched by TV producer Norman Lear and then misapplied to Fred Sanford as the same all-American dyspepsia.
But Uggams gets more latitude — even more than she had in Deadpool, so Dotty’s sarcasm lands differently. Dotty vents the unsettled black resentment that is the paradox we see in the current phenomenon of democratic mayors and legislators taking refuge in socialist retaliation while practicing old-fashioned corrupt-capitalist greed. This new political reality allows Uggams to translate her own personal career wisdom and frustration, giving Dotty & Soul more gravity than Saunders probably intended.
Speaking of his family, Ethan explains, “We changed our name to hide the fact we were Jewish. Nadelman, that was our name.” Yet when he asks, “Do you think I’m racist?” Dotty trumps his soulful confession: “Look, only you know what’s in your heart. What you did was racist, though. What you did was hurtful and degrading and the same thing been done by a whole lot of other racists to hold people like me back for a very, very long time.” The patronizing moment is saved by Dotty appending, “You asked.” It’s Uggams’s matter-of-fact reading that saves Saunders’s ass.
As in all sitcoms, the social issues that Dotty & Soul raises are already solved. Ethan and Dotty fight off a corporate boor (David Koechner), then partner with an immigrant venture capitalist (Farhad Ghorbani): “I’m first-generation Iranian, so I know a few things about barrier to entry for people with darker skin.” He also knows that advertising is virtue-signaling: “When it comes to PR, Dotty will be the face and deservedly so.”
Hollywood’s guilt-hustlers appease themselves by reviving black suffering through wounded characters such as Dotty and Sonja Sohn’s agitated executrix in Soderbergh’s slick High Flying Bird. But most moviegoers resist that effort, sensing contrived trauma as post-Obama patronization at best, and George Floyd, Jordan Neely condescension at worst.
Uggams, at age 79, resists the trauma. She had nailed it definitively in Roots when Kizzy warned, “Don’t trust that man! Him ‘Toubab’!” Saunders’s liberalism is not so daring, but it’s better than Deadpool, so he gifts Uggams bright retorts: “I know. I look 45.” And she does.