Tyler Perry, DeVon Franklin to produce modernized Ruth & Boaz story for Netflix
The film is called R&B and takes place in modern Tennessee.
One other quick bit of unconventional-Bible-movie news: Variety reports that Tyler Perry and DeVon Franklin are teaming up to produce “faith-based” films for Netflix, and the first project out the gates will be a modernization of the book of Ruth:
The first film under the new deal will be “R&B,” written by Mike Elliott (“Brown Sugar,” “Just Wright,” “Like Mike”) and Cory Tynan (“Play’d: A Hip Hop Story”). The project is a modern-day retelling of Ruth and Boaz, one of the most iconic love stories in the Bible. According to its official synopsis, the film is set in Tennessee and centers on a young woman who “escapes the Atlanta music scene to care for an elderly widowed woman and in the process finds the love of her life and gains the mother she never had.”
Off the top of my head, I am aware of only two live-action adaptations of Ruth’s story, both of which are set in the biblical era—and both of them have a sort of musical connection:
In 1960’s The Story of Ruth, which I watched frequently as a kid, Naomi is played by Peggy Wood, who is best known for playing the Mother Abbess in 1965’s The Sound of Music (though her singing voice was dubbed in that film).
And in 2009’s The Book of Ruth: Journey of Faith, which I have never seen, Boaz is played by Christian pop star Carman.
There are a lot of culturally-specific details in the biblical story of Ruth that wouldn’t necessarily translate to a modern setting, like the laws governing widowhood and remarriage, to say nothing of the animosity between the Israelites (Boaz’s people) and the Moabites (Ruth’s people), which is never explicitly mentioned in the story but would have been on the minds of everyone who first heard it.
(It is quite possible that the book of Ruth was written to protest the Mosaic laws against mixed marriage that were ruthlessly enforced by Ezra and Nehemiah; I discuss some of these issues in my notes on The Chosen S2E6.)
So, I’m curious to see whether this film will preserve any of the themes of the biblical story (do Atlanta and Tennessee have the kind of mutual antagonism that Israel and Moab had?), or whether it will end up being a fairly generic romance (with a side story in which the female protagonist befriends an elderly woman).
Perry and Franklin both have experience with biblical stories, Perry as host of 2016’s The Passion: New Orleans, and Franklin as producer of 2017’s The Star.
A couple other relevant links: I commented on Netflix’s new interest in “faith-based” films last month; and I reviewed The Song, a movie that reimagined King Solomon as a modern-day country-music star (and was partly filmed in Tennessee), in 2014.