In The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, three best friends lock arms for life, hoisting each other up as they are dealt one tough hand after another. The women – played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba and Sanaa Lathan in their later years – keep their heads up through crushed dreams, manipulative romances, domestic abuse, addiction, violent hate crimes, the devastating loss of a child and a cancer diagnosis. There’s a lot of trauma to unpack. But that’s not really what The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is out to do.
The movie, adapted from Edward Kelsey Moore’s bestselling novel and directed by Tina Mabry, stays buoyant and lighthearted, with intention. Hollywood only tends to tell Black stories when they can dwell on misfortune. This dramedy, instead, chooses joy and laughter, even when, given the circumstances of its storytelling, such levity can come off as forced. It’s an admirable attempt to fill a vacuum, but we can feel the effort, and the pursuit of a mission statement, over any emotional truth.
At this point, you probably gathered that Ellis-Taylor, Aduba and Lathan are not playing the R&B group famous for belting out Stop! In the Name of Love. Their characters Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean, respectively, are just dubbed “the Supremes” due to a passing resemblance to the singers led by Diana Ross.
The man who baptizes them as such is Big Earl, the warm and generous proprietor behind Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, a diner where the community gathers for drinks and dancing, and we actually don’t see any eating. The so-called Supremes, who lay claim to the same booth at Earl’s from 1967 to 1999 as they work through their love, losses and regrets, never have anything more than a soda or an unopened bottle of ketchup in front of them. The title is a bit clickbaity, if you ask me. I was expecting a musical serving funk with fries and instead got a flighty time-hopping drama book-ended by death.
We’re introduced to the younger Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean (played in their youth by Kyanna Simone, Abigail Achiri and Tati Gabrielle, respectively) as they forge their friendship with an act of female solidarity. Barbara Jean lost her abusive mother. Odette, the feisty one known to “whoop asses and nick souls”, senses that Barbara Jean is in an unsafe situation. The latter’s alcoholic stepfather makes that pretty blatant. So Odette and Clarice immediately step up as her protectors. Odette goes so far as comically whipping off her Sunday best, threatening to box the stepfather in her undergarments should he resist. He doesn’t. And the girls eventually find Barbara Jean a new home with Big Earl.
The saintly restaurateur also takes in a young white kid named Ray (Ryan Paynter), who is escaping his racist older brother’s violent household. Barbara Jean immediately takes to Ray, sensing a kindred spirit from across the racial divide. Their version of meet-cute is comparing battle scars in the storage room at Earl’s. These are just the earliest instances where Mabry’s movie, which she co-wrote with Gina Prince-Bythewood (credited under the pseudonym Cee Marcellus), awkwardly tries to wrestle some comfort and humour (not to mention romance) from severe scenarios.
At midlife, we find Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean attending to Big Earl’s passing. Their benefactor died while knelt at his bedside praying, as though he summoned the higher power to take his life. His stiff corpse, with head still bowed and hands still clasped together, is left in that position overnight, because his supremely silly attention-seeking widow (Donna Biscoe), who turns his funeral into a slapstick farce, didn’t want to disturb her rest.
This is all passably likable stuff. But the comedy throughout tends to be broad, the drama unconvincing and the movie never settles into its competing tones with the terrific ensemble cast, led by Origin’s Ellis-Taylor, doing a lot of heavy lifting to make it watchable.
But there’s a restlessness here. The narrative has a curious way of cherry-picking through these lives and rushing the heavier moments, leaving very little room for the characters (and us) to really stew in their emotions. That shorthand is especially jarring when we’re suddenly presented with what you would think are crucial details. For instance, we only find out one of the main characters has raised a family when it’s briefly mentioned in passing, and we eventually meet the child of another … when he dies!
This is erratic storytelling, like a bunch of detached sketches and monologues, that leaves The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat making gestures towards the movie that it never really becomes. Let’s just hope we can see that movie some day.
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere on 23 August
