Mahogany
Reviewed by Marrit Ingman, Fri., May 18, 2007
Mahogany
Paramount, $14.99
Imagine: You are Diana Ross. It's 1975, and you're fabulous. Very rich people are applauding your collection of off-putting Kabuki-inspired fashions, and your glamorous Italian attaché (schlock actress Marisa Mell) is shouting in your ear: "You're a real success! Success!" The word echoes, and you stumble backward, wall-eyed, remembering how you abandoned soul brother Billy Dee Williams back home in Chicago. Even though you Have It All, and sometimes it's just so fucking great to be you that you stop what you're doing and spin around, you just can't seem to escape the pensive refrain of your theme song.It rises in the soundtrack as you struggle through fashion school, refusing to design a basic cocktail dress. (Never! Yours will have multicolored fan pleats!) It rises in the soundtrack as bitchy photographer Anthony Perkins kisses you unconvincingly, as if to say, "I'm in a great deal of denial." It rises in the soundtrack as you frolic around in avant-garde settings, double-exposed, wearing glitter and fright wigs and numb smiles. When you finally bottom out, drunk in a serape – "I'm a winner! I'm a winner, baby!" – the strings come in to escort you to rehab, which you'll spend in a wheelchair and a turban after crashing a Fiat. And it's all because you never answered those important musical questions: Do you know where you're going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? Where are you going to? Do you know? You turned your back on the ghetto because no one had heard of dolman sleeves, not even Bruce Vilanch in his cameo. But you were wrong.
The message of Mahogany is beaten into uppity women at regular intervals – "Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with" – and each time pads the pockets of music impresario Berry Gordy. (To be fair, Williams gets his own theme song about his mistaken choices: an extemporaneous one his buddies sing to him in a van on the way to a rally. No orchestration. Not the same.) Fortunately, it's impossible to take anything in the movie seriously, not when it's agitating for renters' rights, not when Williams and Perkins are struggling for control of a gun, not when Ross is smearing herself with candle wax. Too long absent from DVD, this camp classic begs not to be taken seriously. Again and again.
