Nothing Beats the Blues Like a Bit of Whoopi
A decade and a half ago, when I was in my early twenties, careening between weekdays of surreptitious FaceBooking at my entry-level publishing job and weekends throwing shapes at rickety warehouse parties, hangovers were a doddle. They were reliably slayed by two cures: gallons of (all the rage!) coconut water and rewatching Whoopi Goldberg’s performance in the eminently watchable, heartwarming and unashamedly perky classic rom-com Corrina, Corrina. Whenever Whoopi’s stellar, groundbreaking career is the subject of discussion, it’s usually The Color Purple, Ghost and the Sister Act films — the sequel far better, of course — that are cited as evidence of her acting or comedic chops. But the overlooked Corrina, Corrina should be in the mix too.
It was my absolute favourite film as a kid. To me, there was something curiously magical, exotic even, about the film’s 1950s aesthetic— the cat-eye sunglasses, natty knitted cardi-gans and sleek Chevrolets — so different from my surroundings of 1990s Fulham. And, back then, leaning into the youngest-child stereotypes with gusto, I was a sucker for films in which children’s feelings were shown to be as big and important as those of their elders. Maybe it was because I associated it with my childhood that the movie had a cleansing, purifying effect, and could cut through the fug of booze. Still to this day I can — word-perfect — recite huge chunks of the script: a vital and much-envied party trick.
Written and directed by Jessie Nelson, the premise of the film is exactly the right kind of straightforward for a befuddled mind. It begins in late 1950s Los Angeles, where seven-year-old Molly Singer (Tina Majorino) hasn’t spoken in weeks, since the unexpected death of her mother. Her father, Manny, played by a twinkly-eyed Ray Liotta, in sharp tailoring and tie pin, can counsel neither his nor his daughter’s grief. As irony would have it, his job is to compose upbeat jingles for ads and yet now the most doleful silence fills the Singer household.
It being 1959, the idea of this widower running his home without female assistance is truly unthinkable — he must find a housekeeper stat! As I lay in bed in Brixton, batting away distracting flatmates and worsening queasiness, I’d always look forward to the sequence in which Manny interviews a host of wrong’uns, including a fantastic turn from Joan Cusack as an unhinged parody of a domestic goddess in vivid gingham. She’s keen, much to Manny’s horror, to fulfil all possible wifely duties. After Cusack’s rapid ejection from the marital bed, Corrina, a Black maid who is down to her last dime, turns up on the Singers’ doorstep.
A fantastically cool Mary Poppins with killer heels and lightning-quick clapbacks (“Chin up,up — you’re too young to have two!”), Corrina Washington is Whoopi at her most charismatic, able to seamlessly shift from expressing earthily wise words on the nature of grief to zany impressions of tortoises within seconds.
Corrina’s silly humour and her unfussily uncompromising stance immediately catch Molly’s attention: unlike the other adults around, Corrina accepts Molly’s need to withdraw and disengage in the face of bewildering loss. But Corrina is no pushover and is inherently pragmatic, too — to communicate with Molly, she devises a non-verbal language of “patting your nose” through which Molly can express wants and needs. There was a rather inflated, theatrical aspect to my hangovers back then — a feeling that no one else could be suffering quite as much as me — and something about this simple con-nection between two characters particularlytouched me in my fragile state.
Perhaps following in the footsteps of Mrs Doubtfire — which came out just a year before Corrina, Corrina — the film is a cosily familiar exploration of the possibilities and rewards of reimagining domestic routines and space. It gently reveals an evolving, deepening bond between Corrina and Molly, a relationship that, later, coloured the depiction of a friendship between a Ghanaian housemaid and a British Ghanaian teenager in my debut novel Hold. The film also focuses on the affinity between Manny and Corinna. Like the beautifully smoky jazz score, softness is integral throughout.
Indulging in a little reminiscing recently — but with a somewhat clearer head — I rewatched it with my husband. He had long known how deeply I stanned the film and he’d been sceptical about it — even after I’d told him about Corrina’s adorably irrespressible five-year-old nephew Percy (Curtis Williams), a chubby-cheeked, pint-sized autocrat who feels he is the man of the Washington household. On a tired Monday evening when
it seemed that we had completed Netflix, my husband’s defences were down. Corrina, Corrina was foisted upon him. As the credits rolled, I looked at him tentatively, to see if the film had had any effect. He put on a mock-pretentious voice, and joked that it was, “of course, entirely about the American project”. I wouldn’t go quite that far, even as an unrepentant aficionado, but my husband’s sense that the film has surprising thematic reach is spot on.
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when, as Manny struggles to find the right rhyme to accompany one of his sugary scores and is exasperated at the lack of inspiration, he asks Corrina: “Have you ever felt... blocked?”’ “All my life,” she quietly responds. Because as much as Nelson’s film is a frothy, perhaps pleasingly predictable romance — loosely based on her own experiences of being brought up by her nanny after her mother died — it’s acutely aware of the racial dimension here, too.
Corrina’s aspirations to write music journalism and liner notes for records are repeatedly thwarted by white gatekeepers; Manny is decried as a “n*****-lover” by a fellow diner when he takes Corinna for a celebratory meal. Corinna's fiercely protective sister — played to perfection by latter-day camp Instagram icon Jennifer Lewis — warns Corrina that Manny is exploiting her kindness, sensitivity and loyalty, in the way, as she sees it, white folks always do. Noting and fearing the closeness between her son and his housekeeper, Manny’s Jewish mother provocatively asks, “A fish and a bird can fall in love, but where do they build their nest?”
I’m not blind. It’s by no means a faultless film: you could reasonably argue that the racial context of the film is drastically underplayed, and the relatively straightforward acceptance of Manny and Corrina’s interracial relationship of course defies credulity. In its tepid review at the timeof release, Entertainment Weekly said there was “something disingenuous about the way Corrina, Corrina at once soft-pedals and fetishises its characters’ racial and cultural differences” and I can see how that conclusion might be reached.
Admittedly, the sexual chemistry between the two leads is 100 per cent non-existent: while their evenly matched banter about Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald feels sparky, their rare kisses have a clunkiness that makes me bury my head in my hands. Plus, it’s a minor quibble, but Whoopi Goldberg’s wig is ridiculous: it’s a vast, immobile thing, a great ship of hairpiece that often distractingly steals the scene.
But these blemishes are, in their way, all part of Corrina, Corrina’s appeal, and why I find myself coming back to it still, when hangovers take longer to get over, and gentle 1990s rom-coms seem the product of a less cynical, less self-conscious age. In one of my favourite scenes, Molly is lying on the lawn, staring at the clouds. She’s laid a polka-dotted dress of her mother’s next to her, and she slips her hand into the pocket. Corrina suggests Molly’s mother is looking down at her daughter, from on high, and is waving. Perhaps it’s sentimental, but Molly’s smile shows she’s deeply comforted by the idea. And who wouldn’t take comfort from Whoopi?
Michael Donkor's most recent book, ‘ Grow Where They Fall’ , came out in February. This piece appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Esquire. Subscribe here
You Might Also Like
