If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Cast: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Michael Beach, Aunjanue Ellis, Diego Luna, Emily Rios, Ed Skrein, Finn Wittrock, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco, Pedro Pascal. Screenplay: Barry Jenkins, based on a novel by James Baldwin. Cinematography: James Laxton. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders. Music: Nicholas Britell.

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.  

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

Alex R. Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight

Adult Chiron Harris: Trevante Rhodes
Teenage Chiron Harris: Ashton Sanders
Child Chiron Harris: Alex R. Hibbert
Adult Kevin Jones: André Holland
Teenage Kevin Jones: Jharrel Jerome
Child Kevin Jones: Jaden Piner
Paula: Naomie Harris
Teresa: Janell Monáe
Juan: Mahershala Ali
Terrel: Patrick Decile

Director: Barry Jenkins
Screenplay: Barry Jenkins
Based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Cinematography: James Laxton
Production design: Hannah Beachler
Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders
Music: Nicholas Britell

Coming-of-age films are the cinematic equivalent of the Bildungsroman, the usually semi-autographical "novel of education" that tracks the formative childhood and adolescent experiences of the protagonist. Dickens, for example, wrote not one but two Bildungsromane: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. In the movies, the classic coming-of-age films include Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, 1955; Aparajito, 1956; The World of Apu, 1959) and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows* (1959). Lately, Richard Linklater has added a distinguished entry to the genre, Boyhood (2014). And now Barry Jenkins adds to the genre with Moonlight, a fine film about growing up black and gay, while deftly avoiding the double pitfall of making his film about being black or gay. There have been plenty of films about growing up black and about growing up gay -- I watched a good film just last night about the latter, André Téchiné's Wild Reeds (1994) --  and much commentary about possessing the dual stigma in a straight and/or white society. But what sets Jenkins's film apart is its avoidance of pop psychology and trite sociology: Moonlight is about being human. You don't need to have grown up in India or France to understand and sympathize with Apu or Antoine, and you don't need to have grown up in the Miami housing projects to sense why Chiron (rhymes with "Tyrone," but with a spelling that suggests the mythical centaur) is so blocked, so stubborn, so silent. Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play Jenkins adapted for the film, step carefully around the clichés of the genre, especially when it comes to ascribing blame. Juan, the drug runner who finds the young Chiron hiding from bullies in an abandoned crack house and shows him kindness, isn't entirely the heroic figure he might be. Juan becomes the fatherless Chiron's first adult male role model, but he's a poor one even though he's generous and understanding, since Chiron grows up to follow Juan's profession and even imitate some of his showy mannerisms. Paula is a terrible mother, but she doesn't want to be: It's the drugs that Juan sells her that send her skidding off the track she desperately wants to be on. Kevin, Chiron's first (and apparently only) sort-of boyfriend, isn't strong enough to stand up to the taunts of the bully Terrel, so he betrays the teenage Chiron, provoking him to violence. So the film ends on an ambivalent note with the reunion of the adult Chiron and Kevin. Are they strong enough now to provide support to each other, or are their lives going to be haunted by the damaged child that was Chiron, seen in the film's final shot? There is something a little too formulaic about that ending, I think. I'm not entirely convinced, for example, that the handsome, bulked-up, successful drug runner that is the adult Chiron would have remained celibate for so long. But Jenkins has risked much and mostly succeeded -- after all, there's that Oscar -- in crafting a film that doesn't play the blame game or rely on pat explanations and outcomes.

*I'm not including the other four Antoine Doinel films by Truffaut because, like many others, I don't sense a real continuity of character between the Antoine of The 400 Blows and the Antoine of the sequels.