First of all, I don't go to see movies for the makeup. I don't care about that controversy. The accent was a bit of a problem; sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to be hearing Nina Simone or Eartha Kitt. The singing, I'd say, was handled well, given the choice not to use Nina Simone's voice (and that choice can be argued with). The first song dispelled any expectation that we were going to get a Nina Simone imitation, and so when later songs recalled her more strongly, what caught our attention was the positive side of the salute rather than the mismatch.
The big problem was the story. Nina in the movie has two problems. She's suffering as a black woman, and she isn't mentally stable. We get a hint at the very beginning that maybe discrimination is what undermined her sanity (although in reality the Curtis Institute still denies it rejected her on racial grounds, and the fact is the Institute was not closed to black women). But despite reminders of the political situation, she seems to embrace her neuroses rather than struggle against them, so an opportunity for drama is lost. She's a law unto herself, either she takes her medication or she doesn't, and there isn't a lot of cause-and-effect for the audience to cling to.
We do see a bit of cause-and-effect when Dr. King is assassinated and she appears to respond by writing "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead." Unfortunately, Nina Simone in reality didn't write that song.
At what sounds like a crucial moment, her career has bottomed out and someone says "She has to deliver truth again. If she does, she can do whatever she wants." But the remark raises your eyebrows because we hadn't seen a stage at which she delivers something other than truth. And when she agrees to start living clean, on her way to a comeback, it seems like a whim triggered by nothing in particular.
If I could go back in time with the scriptwriter, I'd tell her to rebuild the story around that "She has to deliver truth again" crisis and to give it a clearer before-and-after with more sense of a changed attitude. But maybe that would be an even less accurate movie.
The big problem was the story. Nina in the movie has two problems. She's suffering as a black woman, and she isn't mentally stable. We get a hint at the very beginning that maybe discrimination is what undermined her sanity (although in reality the Curtis Institute still denies it rejected her on racial grounds, and the fact is the Institute was not closed to black women). But despite reminders of the political situation, she seems to embrace her neuroses rather than struggle against them, so an opportunity for drama is lost. She's a law unto herself, either she takes her medication or she doesn't, and there isn't a lot of cause-and-effect for the audience to cling to.
We do see a bit of cause-and-effect when Dr. King is assassinated and she appears to respond by writing "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead." Unfortunately, Nina Simone in reality didn't write that song.
At what sounds like a crucial moment, her career has bottomed out and someone says "She has to deliver truth again. If she does, she can do whatever she wants." But the remark raises your eyebrows because we hadn't seen a stage at which she delivers something other than truth. And when she agrees to start living clean, on her way to a comeback, it seems like a whim triggered by nothing in particular.
If I could go back in time with the scriptwriter, I'd tell her to rebuild the story around that "She has to deliver truth again" crisis and to give it a clearer before-and-after with more sense of a changed attitude. But maybe that would be an even less accurate movie.