 |
| KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk |
I wish I could watch and critique If Beale Street Could Talk, a two-year-old movie based on a 46-year-old novel, as a work of drama and filmmaking, instead of being tugged by it into considerations of politics and society. But George Floyd's death and the following two weeks of protests make it, to put it tritely, timely and topical. Writer-director Barry Jenkins subsumes an American tragedy in a richly detailed love story filmed with a slow, loving camera. We watch what should be the charmed lives of Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) turned into nightmare by systemic racism, to use a phrase that echoes through our current moment. Jenkins is a master at mixing moments of pain with moments of beauty. The film's great raw scenes -- Fonny's hyperreligious mother (Aunjanue Ellis) denouncing Tish's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and Tish's mother (the brilliant Regina King) confronting the woman (Emily Rios) who accused Fonny of rape -- are made even rawer by the contrast with the lyrical moments that depict the lives of the lovers before catastrophe, in the form of a bad cop (Ed Skrein), descends upon them. It's the kind of film that makes you want to explore what brought even its secondary characters to be what they are: What made Skrein's cop so bitter? What traumas underlie the victim's choice to pick Fonny as her rapist? What drove Fonny's mother so blindly into the arms of religion? Jenkins makes these characters and others so vivid that we don't just dismiss them as plot devices. Each of them could be the subjects of their own films, as could Fonny's friend Daniel, the ex-con who can barely speak of the horrors of prison. They make If Beale Street Could Talk a film of rich texture, allowing it to go beyond social-political commentary into a lived actuality.
