Italian
Tyler Perry has dedicated the past quarter-century of his career to giving voice to Black women on stage and screen. With “The Six Triple Eight,” the self-made mogul — who leveraged his success to build a production studio on a former U.S. Army base outside Atlanta — has found a story ideally suited to his strengths and interests: how a courageous group of 855 women of color made history during World War 2, becoming the first such unit to serve overseas.
Led by Maj. Charity Adams (formidably played by Kerry Washington), the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion faced adversity on both fronts. First, they dealt with discrimination from their fellow Americans, later adding the threat of German attack once deployed abroad. As members of the Women’s Army Corps, these enlisted ladies did not kill Hitler or even carry guns, but were tasked with a significant assignment all the same: sorting a backlog of correspondence between American soldiers in Europe and their loved ones back home.
Yes, it’s thanks to a team of Black females that white troops finally received their mail. Impressive in both its subject and suggested scope, Perry’s sweeping film reflects how the achievement of these women directly impacted the troops’ morale, despite the adversity they faced from skeptical superior officers. Following in the footsteps of “Hidden Figures,” while honoring those who paved the way for such progress in other fields, “The Six Triple Eight” gives Perry his best and most substantial feature to date (only 2010’s ensemble melodrama “For Colored Girls” comes close).
Popular on Variety The compelling true story marks a significant step forward for Perry, bolstered by the participation of Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey, who appear in small but substantial roles as first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Even so, there remains a slightly amateurish quality to the project, involving on-the-nose dialogue and an odd tic whereby the actors tend to emote with their eyebrows — whereas Washington’s power comes from how much her character appears to be keeping inside.
Audiences will immediately recognize Perry’s ambitions as well as his limitations in the opening battle scene, set in Italy, which depicts the horrors of war: Struck by enemy fire, a soldier cartwheels backward into the trench, his limbs collapsing upon themselves, while bombs blast other soldiers several feet into the air. It hardly rivals the intense D-Day opening of “Saving Private Ryan,” but it’s a hell of a way to open the film, climaxing with the CG crash of an American plane.
Though Abram David (Gregg Sulkin) is burned beyond recognition upon impact, from the fallen pilot’s jacket, a crying soldier pulls a blood-stained letter to his sweetheart in the States. And thus Perry takes us back to Lena Derriecott King (Ebony Obsidian), who will serve as our entry point into a story with hundreds of characters — and just as many individual reasons for enlisting. Before Abram shipped out, the Jewish boy had asked his Black girlfriend to marry him. Perry none too subtly reminds that such a relationship was hardly welcomed in 1940s small-town America, as sniping from their bigoted blond classmate Mary Kathryn (Sarah Helbringer) makes clear.
After receiving news of Abrams’ death, Lena decides to enlist as well. Though boot camp is tough on the bright young woman, it’s nothing compared to what she and the other Black members of the Women’s Army Corps get from the white people around them. Reporters circle, looking for a chance to embarrass the military for accepting Black women into its ranks, while male colleagues are openly disrespectful, with Gen. Halt (Dean Norris) setting a contemptuous example from the top. That dynamic forces Adams, as commanding officer of the 6888th, to be all the more strict.
Offering comic relief, the endearingly uncouth Johnnie Mae (Shanice Williams, who played Dorothy in The Wiz Live!) never hesitates to speak her mind, as when she struggles to squeeze her bust into an ill-fitting uniform — “designed for the pencil figure of a white women, not the curves of a Negro,” according to Adams. Such details reveal how little consideration the U.S. Army showed toward African Americans who’d elected to serve their country, echoed throughout the film, as Adams fights for fair treatment, despite countless indignities.
Once the 6888th are assigned to sort and deliver the mail, Adams must make do without formal orders or adequate resources (not even proper housing), obliging her to improvise how she’ll manage to process multiple warehouses full of more than 17 million letters (a dozen buildings that loom large as the soundstages at Tyler Perry Studios). The women have just six months to prove themselves. It’s an enormous and seemingly impossible undertaking, the failure of which would give men like Halt ammunition to dismiss women of color as ignorant — or worse, incapable of being of service.
Perry tends to hit the depictions of prejudice rather hard, which can have a reductive impact on all these women accomplished. Then again, standing up to bullies is inherently more dramatic than devising novel mail-filing strategies. After the first few thousand letters are returned, Adams invites suggestions from her team, who propose ingenious ways of matching missives to their intended recipients, even when the addresses are illegible, incomplete or half-eaten by rats. Though the 6888 are far from the front lines, that does not make them safe, as air-raid drills and a harrowing scene involving a UXB (or unexploded bomb) demonstrate.
The film boasts a large enough cast to launch a dozen or so careers, and yet, one performance stands head and shoulders above the others: That would be Washington’s forceful turn as Adams, who holds her own against arrogant white officers. In one Aaron Sorkin-esque scene, she wields the words “with all due respect” as a kind of weapon, before insolently barking, “Over my dead body, sir!” After nearly two hours of setbacks and resistance, Perry’s adversity-minded script unleashes a series of cathartic scenes in which the women are recognized for their service — including end-credits archival footage of complimentary remarks by Michelle Obama.
Showcase the perspective and experience of Black servicepeople in the same glorious widescreen aspect ratio used by “Apocalypse Now” and “Patton,” Perry’s non-combat war movie is best experienced on the big screen, buoyed by the rounds of applause elicited by its most rousing scenes. Alas, Netflix is giving the film just a modest Oscar-qualifying run before releasing it to the platform two weeks later (on Dec. 20). Still, with this inspirational true story, the streamer stands to reach a much wider public than Perry’s typical audience, reminding how much of American history remains untaught and largely untold.
