WHAT TO STREAM

Netflix and Tyler Perry Have Made a Lot Worse Than ‘The Six Triple Eight’

Kerry Washington, Ebony Obsidian, and Susan Sarandon star in Netflix’s fact-based drama about a group of female World War II soldiers.

“Are you at war, or are you taking a nap?!?” This is one of the many rhetorical questions asked by Kerry Washington’s Captain (later Major) Charity Adams, leader of a group of women soldiers who will, by the end of this movie, destroy Nazism by sorting the mail.

Okay, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but Tyler Perry’s sweeping wartime epic The Six Triple Eight definitely paints in broad strokes, and doesn’t just push your emotional buttons—it slams them with an iron mallet. This is far from a bad movie—it’s extremely watchable by Netflix standards—but subtle it ain’t. That said, the seed from which it grows is a true, fascinating, and even uplifting story.

The 688th Central Postal Battalion, long ignored by U.S. history prior to some recent journalism and long-overdue salutes from the Obama administration, was the only Women’s Army Corps unit of Black soldiers deployed to Europe during World War II. The WACs faced prejudice, and Black soldiers in the pre-integrated U.S. Armed Forces faced prejudice, so you can imagine how a battalion of Black WACs fared.

Well, you don’t have to imagine—you can watch Dean Cain’s performance as the fictitious General Halt. He grimaces and drools like a sexist, racist, Southern Jabba the Hutt, setting up the Six Triple Eight for failure. Naturally, these women are more than capable—they are exemplary, completing their seemingly insurmountable task in half the time allotted.

What is that task? Sorting the mail. I know, it doesn’t sound like much. But “it’s more than just dropping it in a box,” we’re told, and indeed it was. By the time the Six Triple Eight get to Glasgow, they find several enormous airplane hangars stuffed with a bajillion sacks of mail.

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The logistical headache of getting care packages to fighters at the front—as well as word back to loved ones—understandably took a back seat to, you know, the actual war. But no less a figure than Eleanor Roosevelt (played by Susan Sarandon, looking to one-up Glenn Close’s portrayal of J.D. Vance’s “Mamaw” in Hillbilly Elegy) recognizes that broken communication lines from home sink morale, and this could have a direct effect on the fighting effort. (She wasn’t necessarily wrong!)

Washington and her team figure out all kinds of MacGyver-esque ways to determine where these envelopes and boxes are supposed to go, which means devising clues like sniffing perfumed pages from sweethearts and anticipating troop movements from newsreel footage. These scenes are neat.

Less neat is the shoehorned narrative of Lena Derriecot, a private in the battalion who we follow from her home in Pennsylvania through basic training and beyond. She’s played quite warmly by Sistas’ Ebony Obsidian, who is a terrific performer, but the character is a flat, unrealistic vision of perfection. She’s a budding genius who just wants to serve her country, especially after the death of her soldier crush/boyfriend Abram (Gregg Sulkin).

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Abram was the son of a righteous Jewish family that employs Lena’s family as servants, and is a wholesome Mr. Rogers-esque mensch. This romance has a weird after-school-special vibe that leaves plenty of unanswered questions. Especially when Abram starts appearing to Lena in ghostly visions to help her when she’s down. (Some poking around shows that the friendship between these two was real.)

The Six Triple Eight features no shortage of barracks-set scenes with Lena and her fellow WACs, which quickly remind us that Perry has his roots in theater. (In other words, they all stand on their mark, bark out character-defining dialogue, then wait for the audience to react.) Shanice Shantay as the mouthy Johnnie Mae gets the most attention, like when she explains that she doesn’t have breasts, she has titties.

No scene is more baffling, though, than the one in which Sarandon’s Eleanor Roosevelt, Sam Waterston’s FDR and Oprah Winfrey as Mary McLeod Bethune roll into the Oval Office to bark at Dean Cain about the importance of mail to the common soldier. One has the impression that they received their lines about 11 seconds before Perry called “action.” (Waterston is doing some kind of accent underneath the makeup; Sarandon is sticking her teeth out; Oprah, one supposes, is doing a favor for a friend.)

And yet, despite it all, when the Six Triple Eight get into their mail-sorting groove, it’s impossible not to root for them. They are in a freezing old British school, tackling an impossible task with snotty white men occasionally dropping by to harass them. Kerry Washington gets several opportunities to let ’er rip with some marvelous motivation moments. “There is only one way to eat an elephant, and that is one bite at a time!” she says, something I may end up repeating in my day-to-day from now on. By the end of the picture, when a group of war-weary white boys salute the battalion in a train station, dammit all if I didn’t get a little emotional. The power of the movies!

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The Six Triple Eight is streaming on Netflix just in time for Christmas. This falls nicely into the Green Book category as Boomer-safe viewing. You could do a lot worse.

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