“The Supremes at Earl’s All You Can Eat” a film review
If you were not part of one, perhaps you witnessed an inseparable group of friends who, binded by the depths of their secrets, matriculated from adolescence to adulthood together - providing a soft place for one another to land throughout hard times, and a standing ovation to celebrate the good times. In fact, that’s how we meet our heroine Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) giving her best friend Clarice, played by Uzo Aduba, a singular standing ovation at Clarice’s piano recital - just moments before we are dropped into Odette’s bedroom where she is getting dressed for an oddly paired double date. But on their way to the date, at the titular Earl’s, a local Black owned mom-and-pop staple with a jukebox, Odette’s no-nonsense mother orders them to drop off a box of her homemade chicken to another young woman, Barbara-Jean, who has recently lost her troubled mother.
Upon their arrival, the girls swiftly learn that no one attended the repast, and Barbara-Jean (Sanaa Lathan) is in a harmful relationship with her handsy step-father, and in a series of expositional plot-affirming scenes - Odette solicits the support of Earl and his wife to provide a refuge for Barbara-Jean, and the three girls form a coveted trinity that ultimately lasts a lifetime - proving that friends are sometimes our most enduring soulmates.
Isolated moments are the building blocks of films, but in this film, isolation functions more like a case study than a cinematic motif, creating an anthropological portrait of hyper-independence and intimate human relations. This character study on the joy of lasting friendship and isolated suffering shows us how we could navigate even the tightest-knitted communities and still process our deepest sorrows in bouts and silos of deafening silence. It is a vivid depiction of why we must do more than ask our loved ones “how they’re doing.” But we must also do a double take to see if their responses are real or rehearsed.
“The Supremes at Earl’s All You Can Eat” is streaming now on Hulu starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba, Sanaa Lathan, Abigail Achiri, Tati Gabrielle, and Kyanna Simone.
Article image created using Bing Copilot with the prompt "abstract image based on friendship and isolation".
