Saturday 23 February 2019

If Beale Street Could Talk (2019) - Movie Review



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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