Two more reports have surfaced in response to the forthcoming biopic, Nina, starring Zoe Saldana. Following earlier decrees on the film's casting decision and use of prosthetics and skin darkening make up, Jeff L. Lieberman and Ta-Nehisi Coates have denounced the movie as deplorable and inaccurate.
The main issue at hand concerns Saldana's tailored appearance in the Nina trailers. In them, Saldana is seen with a prosthetic nose and make up to increase the dark hue of her skin. With scathing tweets emerging from Ms. Simone's estate to a defense filed by Robert L. Johnson--whose company, RLJ Entertainment, is releasing the film--the backlash has been severe.
Mr. Liberman, who took to the Internet to respond to Robert L. Johnson's claim that attacking Ms. Saldana "hearkens back to how we were treated when we were slaves," Liberman writes:
"For Mr. Johnson to now claim that this is black people against black people is outrageous, and a desperate distraction. People of all colors are angered because Hollywood has a long history of casting lighter-skinned actors, and even today with a black president in the Oval Office, the Oscars overlooking black actors, and the Black Lives Matter movement at its tipping point, dark-skinned people are still passed over, even for the role of a woman whose story is defined by her proud blackness."
In Ta-Nehisi's published essay, he writes:
"When I was kid, I knew what the worst parts of me were-my hair and my mouth. My hair was nappy. My lips were big. Nearly every kid around me knew something similar of themselves because nearly every one of us had some sort of physical defect-dark skin, nappy hair, broad nose, full lips-that opened us up to ridicule from one another. That each of these 'defects' were representative of all the Africa that ran through us ...[Nina] Simone was in possession of nearly every feature that we denigrated as children. And yet somehow she willed herself into a goddess."
The argument has largely been kept to the Internet and has isolated Ms. Saldana as the main target. In recent news, though, many have started to place their grievances on the casting decision and moved away from blaming Ms. Saldana.
Merely they are beginning to acknowledge that the actress was more of a pawn than a mind on the project.
Nina is due in theaters on April 22 and will be an addition to the Nina Simone canon that has expanded in the last year with documentaries What Happened, Miss Simone? and Lieberman's The Amazing Nina Simone.
Check out the trailer below for the time being while you wait for the release in April.
