Joyful Noises

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SAY AMEN, SOMEBODY

Directed by George T. Nierenberg

At 77, Willie Mae Ford Smith is a round, sweet-faced woman with a shrewd yet sentimental eye, a determined spirit and a powerfully moving voice, now somewhat cracked by long, if lively service to the Lord. She is a beloved gospel singer, much looked to for moral and artistic guidance by people in her profession. Say Amen, Somebody is a documentary that follows her on her exhausting rounds, from bustling home to jumping church services to emotionally galvanic singing conventions. Following in her wake, the audience meets her mentor (Thomas A. Dorsey, a onetime blues singer and composer, now 83, who is credited with inventing gospel music), her peers and the younger singers she continues to guide. Since the music they make is among the most joyful noises ever sent heavenward, the film's jubilant mood is never less than marvelously infectious. Occasionally it is a good deal more than that.

For like almost all good documentaries in the cinema verite style, Say Amen, Somebody is a work of cultural anthropology. It is an exploration of a small, isolated world one would not ordinarily have a chance to penetrate, and it is exotic to the outlander's eye until the film makes the connections to our ordinary ways of life clear and uncommonly affecting. Take Dorsey, for example. He combines a holy man's zeal, a performer's ego and a revered older man's self-contentment, and the film's portrait of him becomes a little essay on the patriarch as enigma. Or consider Delois Barrett Campbell. Onstage she is a shatteringly forceful singer. Off stage she is married to the minister of a humble church who has trouble understanding the ambition that must lie behind a talent as large as hers. Like any wife whose career has outstripped her husband's, she would rather divert him with a home-cooked breakfast than try to explain herself all over again.

The film is shrewd in its selection of these moments. There are just enough of them to ground in a recognizable reality what could have been merely a well-shot and -edited compilation of irresistible music. But they are never so many that they interfere with the film's soaring flights of song. Say Amen, Somebody is a movie to which even a tone-deaf atheist will say amen. -- By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.