I really hate my review for Moonlight. This isn’t me at my
usual self-deprecation; I genuinely don’t like how it turned out. I’ve always
had a policy of utter honesty, even if it meant getting into uncomfortable shit
in the process, but that review showed me at my ugliest. It’s just about the
whitest thing I’ve ever written and it shows, coming across as racist at
certain times. The suburban white kid-in-adult-clothing in me saw Moonlight’s
incredible honesty and rawness and just didn’t know how to respond; it’s like I
just read through someone’s private journal, something that is both true and
something I myself wasn’t meant to see.
That’s the closest I can get to a rationale on why it turned
out how it did, and I can only hope it’s something that hasn’t persisted since
then. And since we’re dealing with the latest from the same writer/director,
and it indeed carries that same heavy feeling I left Moonlight with, I’m hoping
that this review will show that.
This story of an African-American woman trying to clear the
name of her soon-to-be-born child’s father, arrested under flimsy evidence,
treats racial tensions with remarkable smoothness. It delves into the bigger notions
of discrimination, the American prison system and the effects it can have on
everyone involved, but they aren’t treated as the forefront of why this story
is being told. They are wrung out sufficiently, but at its heart, this is a
love story in the purest sense of the term.
While it doesn’t carry the same sexual examinations as
Moonlight, it still feels like it was carved from a similar block in how frank
its depiction of the characters is. It’s fitting in a way, since Barry Jenkins
wrote the script for this congruently with Moonlight, and it carries that same
natural vibe that makes everything stick.
The adaptation process from book to film has some rather
glaring cracks in the foundation, from the occasionally all-too-literary
dialogue to the text-on-black-background introduction that introduces this film
as a book (this is why direct translation isn’t always the best approach), but
when it needs to hit the mark, it keeps managing it both visually and
textually.
Visually, there’s more than enough true cinematic touches to
go around, and Jenkins along with cinematographer James Laxton let the
ostensibly dead air do a lot of the talking. The tenderest moments between KiKi
Layne’s Tish and Stephan James’ Fonny are mostly wordless, yet they carry the
same amount of emotionally-drenched solace that allowed for Moonlight’s strongest
beats. And when the words do come out, like with Fonny reassuring Tish during
their first intimate moment together, it hits the perfect middle ground between sweet and a bit awkward. Or, in the
case of Fonny’s mother after discovering that they are expecting, the perfect
middle ground between vile and tragic.
Textually, the themes whirling around the script about the
African-American experience, lightly touching elements of spirituality and
black church Christianity in their wake, all build on the romance at its core.
The result of this is a patient but highly rewarding romantic experience that
highlights a turbulent, tense and honest relationship, where their love for
each other is portrayed as utter virtue. A love so strong that greasy cops,
prison cells or even the legal system rigged against them couldn’t break it.
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