Adaptation to big screen should find true believers

By JUSTIN CHANG

Variety

LOS ANGELES

A child is born, a family is healed, and a sermon on forgiveness is delivered with sledgehammer subtlety in “Black Nativity,” a bold but clumsy attempt to bring Langston Hughes’ popular musical to life onscreen.

You have to admire the earnest, nakedly emotional approach taken by writer-director Kasi Lemmons as she seeks a free-form cinematic equivalent of Hughes’ stage show-cum-worship service — a rousing fusion of pageantry, gospel music and 19th-century folk spirituals that has been a holiday perennial since its first off-Broadway production in 1961.

But the film miscalculates by planting this African-American interpretation of the nativity story at the center of an angsty troubled-teen melodrama that, from mean-streets prologue to Christmas Eve climax, simply fails to inspire belief.

Still, its faith-based thrust and highly marketable musical elements should connect with viewers inclined to welcome the momentary transformation of their movie theater into a church — specifically, a black Baptist church energetically presided over by the Rev. Cornell Cobbs (Forest Whitaker), one of the principal characters in this fractious family drama.

It’s days before Christmas when moody Baltimore teenager Langston (Jacob Latimore learns that he and his recently laid-off mother, Naima (Jennifer Hudson), are about to be evicted.

Although Naima has been estranged from her parents for years, her circumstances are desperate enough that she sends Langston to New York to spend the holidays with the grandparents he’s never met, Cornell and Aretha (Angela Bassett).

Lemmons leads her story down various historical avenues of black experience.

The director also introduces a contemporary version of Mary and Joseph in a sequence peppered with hip-hop riffs, choreographed by Otis Sallid and fluidly lensed by Anastos Michos.