The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat follows the intertwined lives of three best friends, Odette (played by Kyanna Simmone when young, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in later years), Clarice (Abigail Achiri and Uzo Aduba), and Barbara Jean (Tati Gabrielle and Sanaa Lathan). Over several decades, from their youth in the 1960s to the late 1990s, the trio share a bond that sees them through a litany of life’s trials. Meandering back and forth in time, the film piles on the challenges these women face, from domestic abuse and addiction to loss, cancer, and broken dreams. Through it all is their local diner, Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat.
The Supremes, much like any Midwestern family leaving a Golden Corral, is overstuffed. The film attempts to tackle so many dramatic events — sometimes all at once — that it ends up feeling bloated and imbalanced. What starts as a seemingly heartfelt exploration of friendship and resilience quickly turns overly ambitious with regard to plot fodder, flattening any legitimate emotional or dramatic weight in its bid to communicate the everyday tragedies that these women endure across a lifetime. This inability to properly edit and translate source material to screen treatment is a common affliction in literary adaptions, and all the more when it comes to “I laughed, I cried!” novels like The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, which proved catnip to middle-aged book clubs upon its release a decade back.
Less forgivable than appreciating films or novels for their saccharine amiability is the fact that, for a certain audience, there’s an appeal — often the governing appeal, consciously or not — in watching movies about people who have it worse than they do. Schadenfreude is practically a religion in some slimy corners of American society, after all. That’s especially true when it comes to films about the plights of Black people, with neoliberal wet dreams like Green Book and Hidden Figures making a strong case that white Americans will love any film that details Black folks overcoming struggle, so long as it’s neatly packaged with just the right amount of feel-goodery. The Supremes seems to cater to this audience in its very conception. It’s the cinematic equivalent of comfort food — familiar, predictable, and deeply unchallenging.
Unlike films like Green Book and Hidden Figures, however, The Supremes is at least thankfully guided by Black artists and voices (including the book’s author, Edward Kelsey Moore). But while that certainly eases concerns about intent, it doesn’t make up for the film’s lack of subtlety, which might be the film’s most glaring, fatal flaw, but is hardly its only. Co-written by director Tina Mabry and Gina Prince-Bythewood (credited as Cee Marcellus; pseudonyms rarely bode well, and we’re a long way from Love & Basketball‘s laidback authenticity here), The Supremes is almost pathologically heavy-handed, force-feeding the audience tragedy after tragedy, leaving little space for viewers to breathe and giving them a product so manufactured and contrived that is feels entirely divorced from any semblance of realism. It’s as if the filmmakers were so single-minded on delivering a message — of hope and love and friendship — that they forgot to let any actual story unfold; what’s left is just misery porn shellacked in Disney makeup. But there’s no denying that audiences who prefer only a splash of reality in their rainbow-colored worldview will find plenty to love in The Supremes. In other words, tell your Boomer mom to get streaming immediately.
DIRECTOR: Tiny Mabry; CAST: Sanaa Lathan, Aunjanue Ellis, Taylor, Uzo Aduba, Tati Gabrielle, Mekhi Phifer; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu; STREAMING: August 23; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 4 min.
