In Tyler Perry’s World War II drama, “The Six Triple Eight,” Oprah Winfrey appears as the humanitarian Mary McLeod Bethune. Susan Sarandon (wearing outsized choppers) arrives as Bethune’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady of the United States. Together Roosevelt and Bethune convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Sam Waterston) to press a piqued general into using Black female soldiers to address the mountains of undelivered mail — to soldiers and from them — sitting in airplane hangars in Scotland.
There’s prestige aplenty in Perry’s drama about the only Black, all-female Women’s Army Corps unit serving in Europe: the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. But it is Kerry Washington as Maj. Charity Adams, and Ebony Obsidian as Pvt. Lena Derriecott King, who command our attention.
Major Adams leads 850 women on a six-month mission to move 17 million moldering, rat-gnawed, bloodstained parcels and letters. The movie — Perry’s best yet at balancing his entertainer gifts with his artistic aspirations — veers some from Kevin M. Hymel’s article that inspired it: compressing events, creating composite characters and making an interracial friendship into a love story between Lena and Abram (Gregg Sulkin), which leads her to volunteer.
The drama lands many of the beats of the Greatest Generation genre and its subgenre: Black service members battling on two fronts. But familiarity doesn’t halt it being illuminating and affecting. What initially strikes Major Adams as a menial assignment at best, and a setup for failure at its bigoted worst, becomes a near-sacred operation. And when it does, the film finds a reach-for-your-Kleenex grace.
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