[after finishing a daring and innovative sculpture made of paper clips and cigarette butts, contributing writer and amateur avant-garde artist marrrrrrr replenishes the creative juices by making a simple home-cooked meal and watching an elegantly artistic film featuring a character that’s a self-taught sculptor. this is Midnight Movies.]
film: If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
food: mac ‘n cheese (w/ hot dog and green chile)
pre-game: barry jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight (2016) based on the novel by james baldwin about a woman in 70s harlem trying to prove her boyfriend’s innocence after he’s wrongly convicted accused. liked Moonlight a lot, so high expectations.
post-game: one of the best scenes in If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to 2016’s Moonlight, is also one of the earliest. Clementine aka “Tish” (KiKi Layne) is pregnant. the father, Alonzo aka “Fonny” (Stephan James), is her childhood sweetheart. unfortunately, he’s currently in jail awaiting trial for a rape he didn’t commit. having already told her family, who accept the announcement with love and offers of support, she must now break the news to Fonny’s father, mother, and two sisters.
some of them don’t take it well.
so much happens and so much is said, both by the characters and about them, that i was partly expecting the entire film, which is structured non-linearly, to be centered around the events of that single night.
instead, most of Beale Street covers the relationship between Fonny and Tish, shifting back and forth from their early courtship, emotional conversations across prison glass, and plenty in between, including one eventful evening at a bodega that maybe precipitates their unjust situation. like Time (2020), If Beale Street Could Talk is not interested in either the details of the “crime” nor the ensuing legal case. for this movie, it is enough to establish that Fonny is innocent and that his loved ones are doing everything they can, including some questionably legal activities of their own, in order to set him free.
it is not a legal thriller.
more than anything, Beale Street is a romance, one that so happens to have a tragic situation at its core. Jenkins and his Moonlight team (editors Joi McMillon and Nat Sanders and cinematographer James Laxton) shed none of the style they showed off in the previous film. a shot of Fonny lying in prison will fade into a memory (or a daydream) of him working on one of his sculptures, and then itself fade to a shot of Tish sitting across from him to discuss their future, all set to one of my favorite film scores in recent memory. it’s an ethereal callback to Fonny’s own earlier declaration that without his “wood and metal and without” Tish, he’s “lost.”
it’s true that few of the later scenes have the same electricity as the early confrontation between Tish and Fonny’s respective families, but that’s a minor complaint, and almost beside the point. Beale Street the movie is much like it’s main character Tish: sweet, shy, and deceptively strong. Layne plays Tish with a veil of delicacy that conceals a deep well of inner resolve, always finding the nerve to stand up for herself and for what’s right, even to Fonny, when, on one occasion, the frustrating toll of his situation begins to wear him down.
similarly, instead of sensationalizing the drama of Fonny’s case — which could run the risk of depicting such a gross miscarriage of justice as nothing more than a fiction, a relic of the time period of the story’s setting, or an exceptional outlier in an otherwise noble institution — If Beale Street Could Talk opens the story to contemporary comparisons, making all sorts of possible arguments about the injustice endemic in the current criminal system without having to say a thing. in particular, the plot’s conclusion, as well as the movie’s final scene, will resonate strongly with anyone with a familiarity with the present-day judicial process.
this is a film that knows soft-spoken truths can often ring impossibly loud.
rating: very good and well worth watching.
