On the Return of Compensation: LA Rebellion Filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis’s Masterpiece About Communication and Connection

COMPENSATION 

(Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999, USA, 92 minutes) 

Because I had loved so deeply, 

Because I had loved so long, 

God in His great compassion 

Gave me the gift of song.

–Paul Laurence Dunbar, excerpt from "Compensation" (1905)

 

Part I: The History of the Release

Until earlier this year, thanks to a limited run from Janus Films, I hadn't heard of Compensation, Zeinabu irene Davis's uniquely beautiful and profound take on the silent film. In 2000, the Sundance Channel made it available for subscribers, and then in 2021, the Criterion Channel did the same. Criterion also programmed her other narrative feature, 1991's A Powerful Thang, and three shorts--Crocodile Conspiracy, Cycles, and Mother of the River--but I wasn't a subscriber at that time, though I am now. 

 

Outside of subscribers to those channels and visitors to Maya Cade's Black Film Archive, though, Compensation has languished in obscurity largely because the film, which Davis finished shooting in 1993, disappeared from view almost as soon as it entered the world in 1999 (in 2026, Cade, a former Criterion strategist and Library of Congress scholar, will take the helm of Milestone Films, a specialist in lost films from marginalized voices). 

 

After one somewhat critical review in influential trade publication Variety in 2000, theatrical distributors failed to stake their claim, despite the fact that Compensation was named Best First Feature at that year's Spirit Awards, among other accolades.

 

Variety's Joe Leydon, who wasn't completely dismissive, described it as "indifferently executed" and pronounced its "theatrical prospects [as] weak." By contrast, Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, proclaimed it "a small, quiet, enchanting film," but his kind words were, apparently, not enough.  

 

Over the years, I've often written about films that didn't get their due until after their makers had passed. I don't believe it's a coincidence that many of them, like Jessie Maple's directorial debut, Will, and Christina Hornisher's sole feature, Hollywood 90028, were made by women, people of color, or both in the case of Davis--except she's alive and well. Though she hasn't made another narrative feature, she and her entire family contributed to the refurbishing of Compensation, including daughters Desti and Maazi with husband and screenwriter Marc Arthur Chéry, who assisted with the color correction and descriptive titles–alongside Hard of Hearing filmmaker Alison O'Daniel (The Tuba Thieves)–that make her film shine brighter than ever.  

 

Not long after this year's theatrical release in February, which followed the premiere of the 4K "rejuvenation"--Davis's preferred term–at last year's New York Film Festival, Criterion announced a video release, and it's out now. 

Right: Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1890 / Ohio History Connection

In addition to the black-and-white film, it offers several special features, including the panel discussion at the premiere with Davis, Chéry, and other collaborators. Sadly, cinematographer Pierre H. L. Désir Jr., who appears on the commentary track, passed away prior to the premiere of both film and video. His work throughout is really quite tremendous.

 

Part 2: The Rejuvenated Release

 

Compensation opens with the 1905 poem from Chicago laureate Paul Laurence Dunbar from which it takes its title combined with Reginald R. Robinson's ragtime piano score, followed by a series of still photographs depicting The Great Migration set to ambient sound (which has been enhanced since 1999). It's a remarkably effective way to reproduce the 1900s on a modest budget, not least because Davis took great care in selecting images from eight archives, including those of Gallaudet University and the Chicago Historical Society. (Gallaudet, an educational institution in Washington DC geared towards Deaf students, is the subject of Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim's stirring Apple TV+ documentary Deaf President Now! about a student-led push to hire the school's first Deaf president.)

 

The prologue precedes a silent-film sequence featuring two young ladies, elegantly dressed in white, relaxing under an umbrella by the shores of Lake Michigan in 1906; Davis will return to this beach throughout the film. The music continues, but the dialogue plays out as title cards embellished with Haitian and Kenyan iconography (Davis studied playwriting in Kenya). 

If the entire mise-en-scène brings to mind Julie Dash's dreamy 1991 meditation Daughters of the Dust, it's no coincidence. LA Rebellion filmmakers Dash and Killer of Sheep's Charles Burnett served as two of Davis's mentors at UCLA Film School, and both served as crew members on the 1986 short, Crocodile Conspiracy, that accompanies the new release.  

A young woman named Malindy (Michelle A. Banks) reads and converses with her younger companion, Tildy (Nirvana Cobb), by way of a chalkboard on which the two write out their words. Malindy, like the actress, is Deaf. Davis discovered her through a performance of Waiting for Godot she and Chéry attended in St. Paul, Minn., and knew she had to not only cast her, but reconfigure the film around the performer. Banks rewards the director's faith with a sympathetic and occasionally playful performance. Malindy comes across as proud, intelligent, and confident. 

 

After Gallaudet University segregated in 1905, and kicked out its Black and Indigenous students, Malindy returned to Chicago, where she works as a dressmaker. She meets Arthur (Exhibiting Forgiveness's John Earl Jelks), a Mississippi migrant and mandolin player who works in a meatpacking plant, during one of her trips to the beach. He's intrigued, but when he finds out she's Deaf and communicates by writing, he confesses that he doesn't know how to read. She offers to teach him, and a tentative relationship ensues. 

 

None of this happens right away; there is some resistance on Malindy's part, but she finds out soon enough that Arthur is a good-hearted soul. He just hasn't enjoyed the same economic and educational advantages as her.

 

Then, something surprising happens. If you haven't seen the film or heard much about it, you may want to stop reading. I had no idea what was coming, and found it pretty delightful. Davis sticks with the B&W 16mm film stock, but opens on a shot of the Chicago skyline in the late-20th century as the music builds to a more forceful percussive score from master drummer and multi-instrumentalist Atiba Y. Jali. The Rogers Park locations remain much the same, but it's the 1990s, and the world moves at a faster pace. 

Davis returns to the beach, but this time she introduces Malaika (also played by Banks); most everything else has changed. 

Malindy was a Deaf woman living in a hearing world, but Malaika, a printer and graphic artist, lives in more progressive times. She and her friends communicate using American Sign Language. She isn't as isolated as Malindy, but she's just as protective of her person. Neither woman feels incomplete without a man, and both are resistant to male advances. It goes unspoken, but it's possible that hearing men have tried to take advantage of them. When Malaika meets Nico (also played by Jelks), a children's librarian, she rejects him at first. In both guises, he comes across as a little goofy. 

Malaika's first impression appears as a thought bubble: "This brother ain't got no good sense." To Nico's credit, he's as persistent as Arthur, though neither man is a pest. He senses that the attraction is mutual, but he'll have to prove his worth. Like Arthur, he's eager to communicate with this self-possessed young lady, and doesn't view her deafness as an impediment. 

Without telling her, he signs up for ASL lessons, and because Malaika didn't share his name, her hearing sister, Aminata (K. Lynn Stephens), doesn't realize he's one of her students. On the contrary, Malaika's friends and family worry that a hearing man is the last thing she needs--a fear Malindy's mother had about Arthur--and when Nico tries out his newfound ASL skills, she's quick to correct his errors, but it's clear she's otherwise quite thrilled. 

Both couples have their challenges. 

Even as Nico is learning to speak Malaika's language, she often hangs around with Bill (Christopher Smith), a dancer who is also Deaf. If anything, she's even closer to him than to her girlfriends. One day, Nico drops by Malaika's apartment to find the two dancing to Chicago house music, and he watches awkwardly until they ask him to join them. If two of the dancers can't hear the music, all three can feel it, respond to it, and vibe with each other. My only complaint is that Davis cuts away too soon--the scene is so mesmerizing, I wanted more. 

Malaika and Nico also attend a performance in which Bill moves with grace and athleticism to a musical version of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem. To my mind, he's coded as gay, though Davis never spells it out in so many words. 

If the sequences set in the 1990s aren't silent, she uses subtitles for the signed dialogue and artfully-placed open-captioned titles to describe music and sounds for Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers. Though I've seen plenty of films about Deaf characters, it's often seemed as if they were aimed more at hearing audiences, not least when Deaf actors have been excluded. 

Since 1986, Marlee Matlin has been the exception that proves the rule, and Davis has cited Children of a Lesser God, the film for which Matlin won the Oscar for best actress, as one of the inspirations behind her conception, though the hearing director was a pioneer, too, for building a film around a Deaf character, hiring Deaf actors, and making the film as accessible as possible for Deaf audiences. (Deaf actress Shoshannah Stern's documentary, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which premiered at this year's Sundance, comes to PBS's American Masters on October 14.) 

For all the good things that happen in Compensation, bad things happen, too. There's none of the drug use or gun violence often associated with big-city stories, but like any decade, the 1900s and 1990s had their perils, particularly for Black people. If Malaika and Nico have it better than Malindy and Arthur in many ways, both couples face challenges they won't be able to overcome, and the foreshadowing begins right from the start: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of formerly enslaved persons, was dying from tuberculosis when he wrote "Compensation." The Dayton, Ohio poet and novelist, who counted Frederick Douglass among his many admirers, died in 1906 at 33. 

In that sense, the film hews to the form of a silent-era melodrama in which an indomitable white heroine, often played by Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish, withstands every kind of calamity. It's hard not to wish for happier endings–since there are two in this case–but it wouldn't be the same film otherwise. Compensation is about seizing the moments that make life worth living. 

In comparing past and present reviews of the film, I found a striking difference: audiences now are considerably more receptive to and appreciative of Davis's ambitious entwining of love stories that reflect evolving movements around the rights of women, Black people, and people with disabilities. Lisa Kennedy, for instance, made it a Critic's Pick at The New York Times, Robert Daniels gave it four stars at RogerEbert.com, and in 2021, The New Yorker's Richard Brody stated, quite plainly, "Compensation is one of the greatest American independent films ever made."  

From today's perspective, Davis's concerns don't seem radical necessarily, but though rooted in the realities of the past, her film really was ahead of its time. More recent ventures like Todd Haynes's double-era Wonderstruck and Sian Heder's Oscar-winning CODA feature Deaf characters played by Deaf actors--like Marlee Matlin as a choir singer's mother--but Compensation stands alone, even in 2025, for centering a Black protagonist. 

In addition to the invaluably rejuvenating efforts of Janus, Criterion, and The UCLA Film and Television Archive, which has done yeoman's work in revitalizing the key works of the LA Rebellion, the National Film Registry selected Compensation for preservation just last year, ensuring that Zeinabu irene Davis's remarkable labor of love will never be lost or forgotten again. 

 

Compensation is available from The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and DVD. Images from the IMDb (Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb and John Earl Jelks along with the Chicago skyline), Afterglow (Zeinabu irene Davis on the set), Dayton Daily News (John Laurence Dunbar / Ohio History Connection), DVD Beaver (opening title card), MoMA (Banks and Jelks), Criterion Forum (Jelks, Banks, and Christopher Smith), and Janus Films (Banks and Jelks).

City Pages Flashback: Rocketman Is an Extravagant Jukebox Musical with Heart

This is a revised version of a 2019 City Pages review. The Minneapolis alt-weekly came to an end in 2020, and the entire site disappeared some time afterward. 

Elton John Biopic Rocketman Is an Extravagant Jukebox Musical with Heart--and Sex 

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 by Kathy Fennessy in Music 

Elton is leaving tonight on a plane. Photo provided by Paramount Pictures 

Rocketman is biography as surreal, impressionistic musical. It shouldn't work, but it does. Beautifully. 

As an Elton John fan of long standing, I was cautiously optimistic when the artist first announced the project in 2011. That was seven years before Bohemian Rhapsody racked up almost a billion dollars to become the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and eight years before Rami Malek won the Oscar for his toothy turn as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. 

John and his production team considered Ewan McGregor, Guy Pearce, and Justin Timberlake, but ultimately decided on Tom Hardy in 2013. I was doubtful the buff, swaggering actor could pull it off, but was eager to see him try. Though Malek lip-synced his way through Bohemian Rhapsody, the idea was for Hardy to do his own singing, except everyone—Hardy included—agreed that he wasn't up to the task. He dropped out and Taron Egerton, the fresh-faced kid from Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman series, signed on. (Elton John appeared with him in 2017's Kingsman: The Golden Circle.) 

This seemed like a step back, especially after Egerton's 2018 Robin Hood failed spectacularly with audiences and critics, mustering a measly 15 at Rotten Tomatoes. But Dexter Fletcher previously directed the 29-year-old Welshman in his third feature, 2015's Eddie the Eagle, so they had already established a working relationship. In retrospect, it appears preordained, even if the opposite is true. A Hardy Rocketman would've been a more intense affair, but Egerton brings a welcome buoyancy to the role (though Hardy as butch-era Freddie Mercury really would've been something). 

Right: Taron Egerton in 2015's Kingsman

Before he steps into it, Matthew Illesley and Kit Connor acquit themselves nicely as the young Reginald Dwight, a piano prodigy with a disinterested father (Luther's Stephen Mackintosh), a distracted mother (a virtually unrecognizable Bryce Dallas Howard), and a supportive nan (the delightful Gemma Jones). Once Reg reaches adulthood, Egerton takes over. 

In real life, Elton took his stage name from Elton Dean and Long John Baldry. In the film, a certain Beatle inspires the surname, a move that plays more as a nod to the friendship that produced John Lennon's 1974 hit "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" than to the historical record, but then Rocketman is billed as a "real fantasy." That gives Fletcher, who completed Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer's ignominious departure, license to slice and dice the truth in a way that's less egregious than in a literal-minded venture like his previous one.  

Fletcher got his start as an actor, and not just any actor: blessed with full lips and thick, wavy hair, he played the title role in groundbreaking queer filmmaker Derek Jarman's 1986 Caravaggio. (Jarman was also the director who introduced his otherworldly co-star, Tilda Swinton, to the world.) 

Among Fletcher's 107 acting credits, his most Rocketman-relevant include 1976's kiddie musical Bugsy Malone, Mike Leigh's 1999 Gilbert and Sullivan docudrama Topsy-Turvy, and the 1998 Vaughn-produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (also with Stephen Mackintosh).

If Rocketman is hardly an arthouse proposition like Todd Haynes' multifaceted Dylan portrait, I'm Not There, it's better than most music biopics, and not so much for what it has to say—it's a fully authorized motion picture, after all—but for the visual flair Fletcher brings to it. Elton doesn't just sing; he floats, flies, blasts off into space, even communes with different versions of himself. It's tempting to compare it to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, though it never gets that dark, not even during the depths of Elton's drug-alcohol-sex-food addiction, but characters break into song at key moments just as they break into dance at key moments in Fosse's autobiographical fantasia. 

Other possible references include Pasolini (the nightmarish disco sequence), Ken Russell (the "Pinball Wizard" sequence…among others not directly connected to Tommy), Baz Luhrmann (the way songs fit the mood or theme rather than the year), and possibly even Liverpool laureate Terence Davies, since Reg's family congregates at the local pub like so many of Davies' working-class families over the years—families that often included gay sons. 

If Egerton, who sang Elton's "I'm Still Standing" in the animated feature Sing, isn't a great vocalist, he's unforced and engaging. That may sound like faint praise, but he does justice to Elton's '70s catalog, and that's no mean feat. I had to suppress the urge to sing along to every lyric, a temptation filmgoers of a certain age may find impossible to resist. 

If the comparisons between Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman already feel like overkill, the filmmakers have only encouraged them by working manager John Reid into both scenarios--and by casting compact, dark-haired Game of Thrones actors for the roles; Aiden Gillen (Littlefinger) for the former and Richard Madden (Robb Stark) for the latter. After Reid, a seductive, Machiavellian figure in Madden's precise portrayal, the most significant person in John's on-screen life is songwriting partner Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell). While Elton is shopping around for a record deal, music publisher Dick James (a hilarious Stephen Graham) by way of A&R man Ray Williams (Charlie Rowe) brings the two together. 

In Lee Hall's script, we're meant to believe that John and Taupin never had a single argument, which is patently untrue (Elton to The Guardian: "We've had arguments"), but the actors sell the partnership wonderfully. 

Bell, the more seasoned performer, nicely underplays his scenes, thus confirming that the more conventionally attractive Taupin wasn't meant for the stage, though his affection for Elton is never in doubt. Nor is his concern when his partner goes off the rails. It's a totally idealized relationship, though their composer-lyricist chemistry speaks for itself through the quality of the 24 John-Taupin songs featured in the film, from "The Bitch Is Back" (sung by Elton as a 10-year-old) to "I'm Still Standing" (sung by Elton as a thirtysomething). Hall wrote Billy Elliot, the 2000 movie that made then-14-year-old Bell a star, and knows how to write to the actor's strengths; he would go on to work with Elton on the musical version of that film. 

Rocketman is less skittish than most major-studio features about gay sex. While the PG-13 rated Bohemian Rhapsody took a judgmental view of homosexuality, particularly in the Cruising-style sequence with Freddie and a bit of rough trade at a shadowy gas station, Rocketman earns its R rating with a sunlit sex scene set to "Take Me to the Pilot" in addition to a few other tasteful same-sex sequences (all of which were excised when the film opened in Russia). As Elton told The Guardian in May, "Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven't led a PG-13 rated life." Granted, if the sex was straight, the MPAA would've been more lenient, but the ratings board's double standards regarding gay vs. straight sex and male vs. female nudity are well known. 

The R rating allows for a more honest look at Elton's life than that of the neutered Freddie Mercury; it's also just one of the reasons why Rocketman won't sell as many tickets or win as many awards as Bohemian Rhapsody. 

Once Elton gets clean, the film, which uses a group therapy session as a framing device, is over. Unlike biopics about Buddy Holly, Selena, and other artists who didn't even make it to 25, there's no tragic death to wring the audience's tears. In strictly dramatic terms, Elton made the mistake of neglecting to die before he got old (though his suicide attempts indicate that he made a valiant effort). The now 72-year-old, still-touring artist would, instead, keep going, and doing all of the things Freddie wouldn't get a chance to do: marrying his partner (artist manager and CEO David Furnish), raising children, and receiving a knighthood for his charitable efforts. 

If there's no real tragedy here, and the film doesn't exactly rewrite the rules of the music biopic, it's exhilarating in a way so many others have tried and failed to be. At the very least it gives us the moment when Elton, clad in a bathrobe, sits down at the piano in his childhood home to sing a song while he and Taupin are bunking with his mother and stepfather. There are no glitter sunglasses, no sequined jumpsuits, no backup dancers clad in colorful outfits. "I hope you don't mind that I put down in words," Elton sings clearly and plainly, "How wonderful life is while you're in the world." Taupin steps into the room, and from the way his face lights up, it's clear that he knows exactly who Elton, in that moment, is singing about. He proceeds to give his friend the kind of look any of us would be lucky to receive even once in our lives. If that was the only thing Rocketman gave us, it would be enough.  

Rocketman is available on Blu-ray and DVD through Paramount, in addition to the usual pay operators. Images: ABC News (Taron Egerton in Kingsman), Fandom (Bryce Dallas Howard and Gemma Jones), Empire (Egerton, Richard Madden, and the press), and YouTube (Egerton and Madden get close).