Now
that awards season is in full swing, attention has been turned to Barry
Jenkin’s second feature “Moonlight,” an archetypically American tale about the cross
sections between poverty and identity. While embracing an exciting and vivid style
of its own, the film is stripped bare, minimal and noticeably low-budget. Even
still, Jenkins carefully puts every dollar on the screen, directing with his feelers fully extended to capture every meaningful moment with his
actor’s vulnerable and honest performances.
This
story focuses on three time periods in the life of a struggling African
American boy named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) who has to constantly
dodge the neighborhood bullies for being too quiet and sensitive. Making things
even more difficult, he discovers his mother (Naomi Harris) is using crack
and bringing home strange men to access it. He then finds refuge in the
unlikely parental figures of a local Florida drug dealer named Juan and his
right-hand-woman Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae).
We meet
our protagonist again as a teenager (Ashton Sanders) when he’s forced to
confront his inner conflicts with his only friend and confidante Kevin (Jharrel
Jerome) after their school-yard relationship reaches a new level of emotional possibilities. Towards the last third of the film we drop in one last time with
Kevin and Chiron as adults (Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland), reconnecting
after years have passed and their lives have taken them down widely diverging roads.
Through
these stories are connected by a single timeline, each third works well on its
own as an individual short, which makes a lot of sense given Jenkins many years
working in the short-film format. What he accomplishes in this structure is
something like Richard Linklater’s growing-up opus “Boyhood.” The audience is
forced to look at these three moments in the changing life of Chiron and fill
in the blanks between the juxtaposing segments. This successfully creates a
larger world than the movie has the budget or time to accomplish on its own,
giving the film both an overarching timelessness and the individual spirit of cultural
specificity.
What
makes the film live and breathe is the cast who works hard to be as natural and
as delicate as possible. Because the movie is exploring themes of repression
and the defensive masculinity that queer people in tough urban environments
must front in order to survive, the actors play their parts very close to their chests, avoiding
melodramatic Oscar-clipping as much as possible. The whole cast puts their
trust in Jenkins sensitive direction to use their every hesitated breath and
every raised eyebrow to inform the emotional realities that’s often deliberately left
out of the dialogue. Naomi Harris as the dysfunctional mother is probably the
broadest character and most literal performance given. Compared
to the quiet intensity expressed by the rest of the cast, her portrayal is
much less nuanced and the lines she delivers often mirrors her emotions
exactly. Harris is faithfully playing the role as written, but it looks rather
reductive compared to the subtly sublime work by the three actors who play her
son.
This
might not be your personal growing-up story but the raw emotions expressed in
“Moonlight” are universal. While the ending comes to a disappointing halt just
as the movie’s momentum is peaking and there’s nothing particularly new in the
storytelling-- the plot touches on many tropes in both the coming-of-age and coming-out
genres—the finely tuned performances and Jenkin’s filmic execution feels
personal and authentic, even as he employs familiar narrative techniques.
Grade:
B+
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016
No comments:
Post a Comment