Biopics like Bessie (2015) are wonderful ways to get an entertaining, educational taste of someone’s life. But when pinned to a two-hour runtime, many biopics try to incorporate too much into too tight a window, jumping from life point to life point, not providing substantial reason or background for each segment. It can leave the film a bit disjointed and shallow. While Bessie isn’t the most guilty biopic in cinematic history to fall victim to this presentation, it does have its moments that leave character motivations thin.

“Director Dee Rees, who is also among the film’s screenwriters, clearly chooses to keep the movie laser-focused on Bessie and her reactions, but even here the film lacks coherent transitions” - The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sometimes scripts that have been around as long as “Bessie” get over-worked, over-edited, over-analyzed to the point that they lose some of that screenwriting “magic.” The first half of “Bessie” feels a bit too calculated, too episodic in a way designed to give Latifah and her co-stars (including the great Michael K. Williams) the right number of big moments without linking them together in the arc of a life. And regular TV cinematographer Jeffrey Jur shoots too much of the film like a TV movie. It doesn’t have the cinematic scope or visual language I wish it did outside of the musical numbers. As for storytelling, I found myself too often asking, especially in the first half, “What are we supposed to take away from this story?” - RogerEbert.com

Bessie calls out a lot of societal/cultural happenings of the era of her fame - The Great Depression, the KKK, prohibition - but it does so in a happenstance manner that causes these things to impact the character only because we understand the situation, not because the film shows the details. One minute we see Smith (Queen Latifah) living in a giant mansion, the next minute she’s pawning her jewelry and moving into a junky apartment with a view of a brick wall. What happened? The Great Depression happened, but the film covers this decline through a montage of shots over the course of a minute instead of really saying something. Likewise, Bessie randomly adopts an orphan despite never having shown a maternal desire. Peaks and lows in her love life are frequently examined, but not always the cause. The reasoning behind many elements is foggy.

While none of this is completely detrimental to the film’s exposition of the woman (we still walk away with a solid sense of who Bessie was and why she needs to be remembered), it does make a lot of the film feel thin and strangely paced.