THERE'S a character in "Black Nativity" named Langston, but that's about all this movie has in common with the Langston Hughes gospel stage musical of the same name.
Writer-director Kasi Lemmons ("Eve's Bayou") has made significant and interesting changes in the story and the music - in her updated version, a struggling single mom (Jennifer Hudson) sends her son (Jacob Latimore) to spend Christmas with his grandparents (Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett) in Harlem.
Lemmons has repurposed some old songs and commissioned some new songs (by Raphael Saadiq). You get one of them right away - Hudson sets her powerful vocal phaser on stun to sing "Test of Faith," as her character ships young Langston (Latimore) off to New York, where the homesick young man tries to fit in and to figure out why his mother and his grandparents are estranged.
The mystery has to do with the father Langston never knew, with the circumstances of his birth, the details of which are suited to the title themes, which recur in the narrative - a local homeless woman (Grace Gibson) is pregnant and looks for shelter.
She ends up, as do all the characters, in the church of the Rev. Cobbs (Whitaker), where all questions are answered, and family differences are addressed in an emotional finale.
Lemmons' story folds more characters into the mix - Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a local pawnbroker who's like all three wise men in one;Tyrese Gibson is his streetwise No. 2. Most of the cast also gets to sing. Attention will focus on the showstopping vocal work of Hudson and Mary J. Blige (playing Harlem's resident angel), but I liked Grace Gibson's acoustic variation of "Silent Night" - Gibson, by the way, is the daughter of Lynn Whitfield, who starred in Lemmons' "Eve's Bayou."
It was fun to see Whitaker trying out his pipes in the middle of all these professional singers. Ditto Bassett, until you remember that she played Tina Turner, and knows her way around a song.
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