Moonlight (2016)
IMDB Rating 8.7/10
Director: Barry Jenkins
Writers: Barry Jenkins (screenplay),
Tarell Alvin McCraney (story by)
Stars: Mahershala Ali, Shariff Earp,
Duan Sanderson
R | 1h 51min | Drama
Storyline
Three time periods - young adolescence, mid-teen and
young adult - in the life of black-American Chiron is presented. When a child,
Chiron lives with his single, crack addict mother Paula in a crime ridden
neighborhood in Miami. Chiron is a shy, withdrawn child largely due to his
small size and being neglected by his mother, who is more concerned about
getting her fixes and satisfying her carnal needs than taking care of him.
Because of these issues, Chiron is bullied, the slurs hurled at him which he
doesn't understand beyond knowing that they are meant to be hurtful. Besides
his same aged Cuban-American friend Kevin, Chiron is given what little guidance
he has in life from a neighborhood drug dealer named Juan, who can see that he
is neglected, and Juan's caring girlfriend Teresa, whose home acts as a
sanctuary away from the bullies and away from Paula's abuse. With this
childhood as a foundation, Chiron may have a predetermined path in life, one
that will only be magnified in terms
IMDB link Here
Is This the Year’s Best Movie?
To describe “Moonlight,” Barry
Jenkins’s second feature, as a movie about growing up poor, black and gay would
be accurate enough. It would also not be wrong to call it a movie about drug
abuse, mass incarceration and school violence. But those classifications are
also inadequate, so much as to be downright misleading. It would be truer to
the mood and spirit of this breathtaking film to say that it’s about teaching a
child to swim, about cooking a meal for an old friend, about the feeling of
sand on skin and the sound of waves on a darkened beach, about first kisses and
lingering regrets. Based on the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by
Tarell Alvin McCraney, “Moonlight” is both a disarmingly, at times almost
unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American
reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.
The stanzas consist of three
chapters in the life of Chiron, played as a wide-eyed boy by Alex Hibbert, as a
brooding adolescent by Ashton Sanders and as a mostly grown man by Trevante
Rhodes. The nature and meaning of manhood is one of Mr. Jenkins’s chief concerns.
How tough are you supposed to be? How cruel? How tender? How brave? And how are
you supposed to learn?
Chiron’s initiation into such
questions seems to be through fear and confusion. We first encounter him on the
run, fleeing from a bunch of other kids who want to beat him up. Chiron is
smaller than most of them — his humiliating nickname is Little — and vulnerably
different in other ways as well.
His effort to understand this
difference — to work out the connection between the schoolyard homophobia of
his peers and his own confused desires — is one of the tracks along which his
episodic chronicle proceeds. Another, equally painful and equally complicated,
is Chiron’s relationship with his mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), who slides
from casual crack smoking into desperate addiction.
The drug trade around the Miami
housing project where she and her son live is controlled by Juan (Mahershala
Ali), who becomes a kind of surrogate father for Chiron. The tidy, airy house
where Juan lives with his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), becomes an oasis
of domestic stability, a place with hot meals, clean sheets and easy
conversation. (Though for someone who at every stage says as few words as he
can, easy is a relative term.) That this comfort is purchased with the coin of
his mother’s misery is not lost on Chiron. “My mama does drugs?” he asked Juan
at the dinner table. “And you sell drugs?” Watching him complete the syllogism
in his head, and watching Juan’s reaction, is heartbreaking.
But there is much more to
“Moonlight” — and to Juan — than this brutal double bind might suggest. The
drug dealer as default role model for fatherless youth is a staple of hip-hop
mythology, pop sociology and television crime drama. But Juan, like a figure in
a Kehinde Wiley painting (and for that matter like Chiron, too, in a later
phase of his story) evokes clichés of African-American masculinity in order to
shatter them.
To say that Mr. Jenkins, Mr.
McCraney (and the formidable Mr. Ali) humanize Juan is to get it exactly
backward. Nobody in Juan’s situation — or in Chiron’s or Paula’s — has ever
been anything other than human. You might think that would go without saying by
now, but the radical, revelatory power of this movie suggests otherwise. Like
James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — or, to take a more recent
example, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” — “Moonlight”
dwells on the dignity, beauty and terrible vulnerability of black bodies, on
the existential and physical matter of black lives.
Only after I had seen
“Moonlight” for a third time — and only after a European acquaintance pointed
it out to me — did I notice the almost complete absence of white people from
the movie. I don’t bring this up to suggest that the movie or my admiration for
it in any way “transcends” race. Nor do I want to damn this film, so richly
evocative of South Florida that it raises the humidity in the theater, with the
faint praise of universalism. To insist that stories about poor, oppressed or
otherwise marginal groups of people are really about everyone can be a way of
denying their specificity. The universe is far too granular and far too vast
for any one of us to comprehend, and Mr. Jenkins is far too disciplined a
filmmaker to turn his characters into symbols.
He does not generalize. He
empathizes. Every moment is infused with what the poet Hart Crane called
“infinite consanguinity,” the mysterious bond that links us with one another
and that only an alert and sensitive artistic imagination can make visible. From
first shot to last, “Moonlight” is about as beautiful a movie as you are ever
likely to see. The colors are rich and luminous. (The director of photography
is James Laxton.) The music — hip-hop, R&B, astute classical selections and
Nicholas Britell’s subtle score — is both surprising and perfect.
But all this beauty — the
sensuality of the camera movements, the slowness of many of the scenes, the
lovely hush that descends over the final act — is more than just a matter of
style or virtuosity. It’s integral to the movie’s argument.
In structure and tone,
“Moonlight” sets itself against the earnest, austere naturalism that has become
a default setting for movies about social misery. Chiron and Paula certainly
suffer (and inflict suffering on each other), but they are liberated from the
standard indie-film arc of abjection and redemption. Mr. McCraney’s play is a
layered and fractured collage of voices, and while Mr. Jenkins has adjusted the
shape to the linear demands of narrative filmmaking, he has retained the
original’s vital focus on Chiron’s inner life.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a
screen adaptation of a stage play that has been at once so true to the spirit
of its source and so completely cinematic. Though the film, like Richard Linklater’s
“Boyhood,” is driven more by the flow of experience than the mechanics of plot,
there are plenty of twists and reversals. Chiron’s friendship with a schoolmate
named Kevin (who grows from Jaden Piner to Jharrel Jerome to André Holland, all
excellent) evolves through a dance of camaraderie and betrayal that is better
witnessed than described. A significant death takes place in the interval
between two of the chapters and is mentioned only in passing. Prison sentences
are dealt with in the same way. Crime, violence and incarceration are facts of
life, but no life can ever be the sum of such facts.
And perhaps the most beautiful
thing about “Moonlight” is its open-endedness, its resistance to easy summary
or categorization. I guess I’m back where I started, trying to decide what this
movie is about. As with any original and challenging work, the answer may take
a while to emerge, but what strikes me now is less the pain of Chiron’s
circumstances than the sense that, in spite of everything, he is free. A
bullied, neglected and all-but-silent child, he grows toward an understanding
of himself and his world, and though it is agonizing to witness his progress,
it is also thrilling. To be afforded a window into another consciousness is a
gift that only art can give. To know Chiron is a privilege.
Read full review at New York times
☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀
Movie Rating ★★★★★
Devastating drama is vital portrait of black gay
masculinity in America
Writer/director Barry Jenkins’ bold
and uniquely told film about the struggle to accept one’s own sexuality is both
heartbreaking and deeply relevant
It’s been a particularly
horrifying year for minority groups in America. The increasingly documented
inhumanity towards African American men by police and the brutal act of
homophobia that took mostly Hispanic lives at a gay club in Orlando have
awakened many to the bleak knowledge that progress is stalling and instead,
regressive views on race and sexuality are still dangerously pervasive.
Stories of LGBT people of
colour have been largely ignored in film or at least relegated to the sidelines
while instead, we’re offered up the whitewashed history of Roland Emmerich’s
tone deaf Stonewall or straight-friendly Oscarbait like The Danish Girl. But, in
a festival season that’s too often populated by quite literally vanilla awards
fare, writer/director Barry Jenkins’ astonishing new film is both proudly black
and refreshingly queer. It’s a thrilling, deeply necessary work that opens up a
much-needed and rarely approached on-screen conversation about the nature of
gay masculinity.
Based on the play In Moonlight
Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the film follows the life of a
man in three key stages. Initially, we meet nine-year-old Chiron as he runs
through the streets of Miami, chased by his peers. He attracts the attention of
local drug dealer Jean (Mahershala Ali) who comes to his aid and with the help
of his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae), he gets him to open up as they take
care of him at their home. It becomes a refuge for him, away from his mother
Paula (Naomie Harris, giving her best performance since 28 Days Later), a nurse
with a crack addiction, who alternates between overbearing affection and cruel
neglect.
Chiron is withdrawn and lonely,
a target for the boys at school who seem to recognise something within him
that’s still a secret to Chiron himself. In one, unforgettably wrenching scene,
he asks Jean and Teresa what a faggot is and how he knows if he might be one.
By the time we see Chiron in the second chapter, he’s a teenager who’s learned
to survive by hiding his sexuality from those around him, slowly developing a
tough exterior. But his true identity still haunts him, he cries so much he
worries he might “turn into drops” and he remains a bullied and physically
abused outcast. In the final stretch, Chiron is a man with a fully developed
guard against the world, a toxic masculinity that’s led him down dark and
dangerous alleys to avoid facing who he really is.
Despite the difficult subject
matter at hand, Jenkins avoids drowning us in despair. There’s a remarkably
unexpected focus on the beauty that surrounds Chiron with moments of soaring
wonder so perfectly aligned that there’s something almost Malickian about his
marriage of lush music and dreamy imagery. It’s an entirely unique vision and
wrongfoots us from the start. Similarly, the script avoids cliche and refuses
to paint these characters as the stereotypes they’re so often presented as.
Chiron’s surrogate father of sorts, played with exceptional deftness by Ali,
confounds our worst Hollywoodised expectations. Rather than training Chiron to
run drugs for him or grooming him in a predatory manner, he’s giving swimming
lessons and telling him that his sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s
yet more levity that helps the film from becoming unrelentingly grim.
But Jenkins doesn’t pull any
punches in showing the crushing loneliness and horrific violence of being a gay
man in a culture where homosexuality is seen as a weakness. We see the visible
and invisible scars that develop from a lack of acceptance and by the time we
finally meet adult Chiron, played with incredible nuance by ex-athlete Trevante
Rhodes, he’s trapped by his own desire, regulating his behaviour to remove
anything that could be seen as “gay”. The third act sees him return home to
reunite with a school friend (an exceptional performance from Andre Holland)
with whom he had his one sexual encounter with during his teenage years.
There’s a thrilling, heart-pumping chemistry in these scenes as we see Chiron’s
performed toughness fade in the face of a love he’s so sorely needed throughout
his tortured life. It’s beautifully choreographed and easily the most
believably intimate gay pairing since Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. Every single
aching glance is a poignant reminder of what Chiron has endured to get here.
Moonlight is a profoundly
moving film about growing up as a gay man in disguise, a difficult and damaging
journey that’s realised with staggering care and delicacy and one that will
resonate with anyone who has had to do the same. We’re starved of these
narratives and Jenkins’ electrifying drama showcases why they are so hugely
important, providing an audience with a rarely seen portrait of what it really
means to be a black gay man in America today. It’s a stunning achievement.
Read full review at The Guardian
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Movie Rating ★★★★★
An intense, raw tale of growing up gay in Miami
Jenkins is an innovative
director, sometimes separating sound and vision, so that you see Chiron’s
reaction while hearing his voice in your head. The film displays an emotional
intelligence that transcends all the expected clichés.
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A haunting reflection on African-American
masculinity, writer-director Barry Jenkins' intimate character study traces the
life of a black gay man from his troubled Miami childhood to maturity.
Barry Jenkins' Moonlight pulls
you into its introspective protagonist's world from the start and transfixes
throughout as it observes, with uncommon poignancy and emotional
perceptiveness, his roughly two-decade path to find a definitive answer to the
question, "Who am I?" While the fundamental nature of that central
question gives this exquisite character study universality, the film also
brings infinite nuance and laser-like specificity to its portrait of
African-American gay male experience, which resonates powerfully in the era of
Black Lives Matter.
The story was originally
conceived as a short play called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell
Alvin McCraney. His work for the stage — such as The Brother/Sister Plays and
Choir Boy — has often examined the lives of young black gay men from comparable
social backgrounds, winning him numerous awards including a 2013 MacArthur
"Genius Grant." Jenkins and McCraney have similar Miami backgrounds,
making this an intensely personal film about a bullied kid growing up in the
poor Liberty City milieu at the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. Even so,
when one character remarks to another about the ocean breeze that brings
moments of stillness and quiet to the hood, there's an elemental magic in the
setting.
In a film laced with superb and
widely varied music choices that often play in illuminating contrast to the
scene unfolding, Jenkins opens with a subversive wink and a few bars of the
silky '70s groove of Jamaican singer Boris Gardiner's "Every N—er is a Star."
There's a subtle comment on the
codes of black masculinity embedded in the director's choice not to introduce
his main character first, instead starting with the man who will become a
protector and role model for him. A refreshing departure from the usual template
for such characters, Juan (Mahershala Ali) is a Cuban-born drug-dealer who runs
a tight local crew. In a brief exchange with one of his lieutenants working a
corner of the poverty-line community, we see instantly that Juan has a decency
at odds with his chosen trade.
The drama is divided into three
chapters unfolding during formative times of the central figure's life and
taking their titles from his nicknames as well as his actual name: in order,
Little, Chiron, Black. He's first seen as a terrified 9-year-old kid (Alex
Hibbert) fleeing taunting school thugs and seeking refuge in a crack house
where Juan finds him. Unable to get the boy to talk, Juan takes him for a diner
meal and then to the home he shares with his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monae),
where he stays the night. That address becomes a frequent shelter to
"Little," providing him with warmth and lessons in self-worth,
particularly when his crack-addict single mother Paula (Naomie Harris) is
strung out or busy with a man.
These early scenes are
especially beautiful, notably a painful exchange in which Chiron asks Juan to
explain the homophobic slur often hurled at him, and then asks direct questions
about his mother's drug habit. One particular high point is an interlude during
which Juan takes him to the beach and gives him a rudimentary swimming lesson,
teaching him how to float and feel like he's "at the center of the
world." The contrast between his moments of reprieve at Juan's airy house
and the seesaw of life at home, in a dingy apartment with his loving but wildly
erratic mother, is quite moving.
The abrupt disappearance of a
key character in the second chapter, for reasons we are left to infer, is
saddening. It leaves Chiron (Ashton Sanders), now at high school, even more
isolated and vulnerable. The boy he has silently loved since childhood, Kevin
(Jharrel Jerome), has grown into a cocky youth, who shares a spliff with Chiron
on the beach one night. Jenkins' delicate yet sensual handling of Chiron's
first experience of sexual intimacy in that setting is exemplary. But any
lingering afterglow evaporates when Chiron's chief persecutor at school
conscripts Kevin to beat the hell out of him. That brutalizing experience
sparks the victimized kid's first visceral taste of rage.
The third chapter jumps forward
another decade, during which Chiron (Rhodes) has built himself up while serving
juvenile prison time in Atlanta. More or less, he has become Juan — same
do-rag, same diamond earrings, same muscled body, same line of work — with some
additional bling, including double gold grillz. But the same reticent, bruised
kid he once was is revealed first in a lovely scene with the rehabilitated
Paula, atonement etched across her face, and later with an equally changed
Kevin (Andre Holland), who calls out of the blue to seek forgiveness and
re-establish contact.
Jenkins' well-received but
little-seen 2008 date-movie debut, Medicine for Melancholy, already showed
insight into issues of class and race, as well as an ability to coax
fine-grained performances that seemed effortless. Moonlight, which is edited by
Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon like an extended dream punctuated by electric
awakenings, advances those merits into another league; it's fluid and
seductive, deceptively mellow, and shot through with searing compassion. All
the clichés of the coming-of-age movie have been peeled away, leaving something
quite startling in its emotional directness. And though the movie is never
sentimental, while watching you become aware how rarely we get to see black
male characters onscreen in such an emotionally revealing light.
It also has moments of
swoon-inducing romance to equal those of suffering and solitude, feelings
deftly magnified by the director's use of music. The dulcet voice of Caetano
Veloso has never sounded sweeter, and if your heart doesn't skip a beat when
Barbara Lewis comes on a jukebox singing "Hello Stranger," you need
to get it checked. Those and other song choices augment a melancholy, melodic
score by Nicholas Britell.
Cinematographer James Laxton
soaks the film in sleepy, sun-scorched light early on and then burnished,
darker tones later, also shifting from unfussy handheld shooting into graceful
glides and pans. Immersive intimacy is the key visual note. The clear-eyed,
naturalistic look also is punctuated with head-on portraits of principal
characters against spare backgrounds, at times in oversaturated colors, a
device that feeds the dual embrace of poetry and realism.
While there's no doubt that
Chiron is the film's focus, Jenkins also doesn't short-change the secondary
characters. There are rich moments for Ali as the unlikely father figure,
singer-turned-actress Monae as the idealized alternative mother and Harris as
the far more problematic real thing, a woman whose protective instincts fight
with the manipulative cunning of the addict, giving way to unforgiving
self-recrimination later on. Holland also is a gentle knockout as the adult
Kevin, both careworn and liberated by the hard lessons of experience.
But it's the sensitivity and
the binding, understated rawness of the three remarkable actors playing Chiron
— angel-faced Hibbert, whose eyes are like bottomless pools; Sanders, with his
touching grace and wounded gaze; and Rhodes, extraordinary in the self-exposure
he achieves with minimal outward display — that make the film so emotionally
satisfying.
It would be tempting to call
Moonlight an instant landmark in queer black cinema, if that didn't imply that
the experience it portrays will speak only to a minority audience. Instead,
this is a film that will strike plangent chords for anyone who has ever
struggled with identity, or to find connections in a lonely world. It announces
Jenkins as an important new voice.
Read full review at Hollywood Reporter
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