Based upon the novel by James Baldwin
Written For The Screen and Directed by Barry Jenkins
**** (four stars)
RATED R
A film of devastating beauty.
It has not been lost on me whatsoever, that within this purely exceptional cinematic year, we have been exuberantly presented with an unusually high amount of excellence regarding Black cinema. From superhero epics (Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther"), to children's fantasias (Ava DuVernay's "A Wrinkle In Time"), to bare knuckled, high wire satires (Boots Riley's "Sorry To Bother You"), to crowd pleasing blockbusters (Steven Caple Jr.'s "Creed II"), to coming of age dramas (George Tillman Jr.'s "The Hate U Give") and of course, Spike Lee's blistering "BlacKKKlansman," 2018 truly delivered a cinematic spectrum pertaining to the Black Experience unlike anything I have seen in years past.
And now, as I have taken in Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk," his adaptation of the James Baldwin novel as well as his follow up to the Oscar Best Picture winning "Moonlight" (2016), not only has Black cinema received one of its highest achievements this year, the movies as a whole, and therefore all of us who love the movies, have been given what could only be considered to be a gift.
Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk" is a work of visionary elegance, a sumptuous tone poem that simultaneously soars and plunges into the profoundly urgent yet tender heart of its central love story and the uncompromisingly dark heart and shameful indifference of America's relentless injustices. In what is unquestionably one of the year's most humane films, we also have one of its finest. It is just a privilege to see something as supremely artful as what Barry Jenkins has delivered to all of us.
Just as with the James Baldwin novel from which it is based, "If Beale Street Could Talk" takes place in Harlem during the early 1970's and centers itself around the relationship between the film's narrator, 19 year old Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and her 22 year old artist/fiancee Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephan James). Cherished best friends since childhood, now grown into committed lovers with hopes of beginning their adult lives together, which includes becoming parents to their unborn child, find themselves with dreams crucially deferred as Fonny is falsely accused of rape and imprisoned, leaving Tish to endure her pregnancy without him.
While undoubtedly terrified, Tish and Fonny remain determined to not allow their love for each other to falter, even as jail eats away at Fonny's spirit. Meanwhile, Tish is surrounded and held upright by the tenacious love of her family, which includes her salt-of-the-Earth Father, Joseph (the excellent Colman Domingo), her fiercely compassionate Mother, Sharon (the inimitable Regina King) and her sharp tongued sister Ernestine (Teyonah Paris), each of whom all attempt to discover solutions to Fonny's plight and ultimately, get him freed.
Told in an exquisite, non-linear structure, Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk" is a film that is decidedly and purposefully not in any hurry to reach any conclusions or destination. It is a work that unfolds luxuriously. Working in breathtaking tandem with Cinematographer James Laxton and most crucially with Composer Nicholas Britell's elegant, melancholic score, Jenkins has again delivered a stunning, languid film, an experience of expressionistic poetry fully designed for audiences to luxuriate themselves within the spoken and visual language as if one is sitting alone reading and fully digesting a series of sonnets.
Barry Jenkins is not interested in extolling an agenda, or even instructing the viewer how to think or feel. But with that, he has presented a work of pure artistry and aching empathy as his presentations of African-Americans' upended dreams merged completely with the persistence of hope, love, family and justice make the film as powerful a statement about being Black in America as any more incendiary works about the same subject matter.
In many ways, the film feels like a series of moments, or better yet, memories of moments, all played back to Tish, and therefore, to us in the audience, much like our own memories--almost determinedly refusing to run in the sequence in which they occurred in real life, but as some sort of mental patchwork as Tish tries to stitch together said moments in order to make greater sense of the tragedy that has only continued to exist and quite possibly may refuse to conclude.
In doing so, what we are given is the basis, strength and dogged endurance of the film's love story between Tish and Fonny. A walk in the rain after a meal in Spanish Harlem. The joy in, at long last, being accepted into renting and moving into the first real address of their young adult lives. Marveling at sharing baths together as small children to the realization of their deep and pure emotional connection as lovers. Making love for the first time in a basement apartment with raindrops clearly audible outdoors. Just the look of unending love from one set of eyes and soul to the other. To me, this was a cinematic love story that moved like Miles Davis' "Sketches Of Spain" (released July 18, 1960) and was as lush as the most colorful Picasso paintings.
Barry Jenkins doesn't just show us the love, he bathes us inside of it, through his peerless usage of color, lighting and the superlative work from his two leads, KiKi Layne and Stephen James, two actors that I am unfamiliar with yet will firmly keep my eyes open for from now own as their respective performances, weaved the dreamlike and a grounded, multi-layered quality that spoke to the romantic heights and the brutality of the injustice that kept them apart and solely through a racist fallacy and judicial system.
To that end, Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk" could serve as a companion piece to both Steve McQueen's "12 Years A Slave" (2013) and Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station" (2013), two films that deftly illustrate that for Blacks in America, we are never as free as we just may think or believe ourselves to be. That whatever freedoms that we may happen to possess can be taken away and even obliterated within an instant, leaving us trapped in worlds we never created for ourselves, with people who disregard our shared humanity for we are never seen as human beings, and that is if we are not extinguished altogether.
Through Tish, we are witnessing an awakening. Not to suggest that she is necessarily naive or viewers the world through rose colored glasses, especially considering the straightforward nature of her family. But, it is when she gradually moves from family to Fonny to the larger outside world that her worldview builds, is challenged and a greater realization and understanding is unearthed as a result.
A stunning sequence late in the film, as she is employed as the first Black female at a department store makeup counter, showcases her perceptiveness with how she is viewed and treated by Black and White male customers and the minute details revealed, and as riveting as they are, provide a window into the world of Black women that is, in essence, unseen in modern cinema and therefore unacknowledged in the real world for who else would know or empathize?
Tish's awakening is mirrored with or own as we view this film and to that end, connects us even greater to the love she holds for Fonny and the love he holds for her in return. Again, Jenkins simultaneously lifts us in its purity and crushing us in its adversity, an adversity that is delivered to a superior, haunting degree through the character of Daniel Carty (played by the enormously gifted Brian Tyree Henry from FX's "Atlanta"), an older friend of Fonny's, just released from his own falsely accused jail time. His monologue, which contains revelations about himself and his place as a Black man in a White world, is quietly shattering in its sobering reality and it rightfully hovers throughout the film afterwards as a cloud of sorrow.
It is this very awakening that permeates throughout the entirety of "If Beale Street Could Talk" as Barry Jenkins also gives us a front row seat into the diversity of the Black community from families that are more secular, to ones that are more religiously devout and the divide that exists in between. Social-political outlooks that are more conservative to liberal are presented as well, again showcasing the reality that African-Americans are not a monolithic unit who work as if within a hive, all holding beliefs of the same mind.
Yet, above all else, Jenkins celebrates the tenacity that exists within the love of the Black family, and therefore, the love that has afforded us our continued existence within a corrupt system that is designed for us to not survive. Love will find a way for working class Black Fathers to somehow find the money to pay the young Jewish attorney's legal fees to try and get Fonny released from prison. Love will find a way for a Black Mother to travel to Puerto Rico to hopefully confront the woman who wrongfully accused Fonny, thus having him arrested. And love will find a way to keep Fonny's soul alive behind bars when all hopes for release are running out. And even still, Jenkins is wise to question that for all love's power, is love ever really enough when faced with racist inhumanity?
By the film's end, I experienced this feeling of submergence. I just succumbed. I succumbed to the sheer weight of this transcendent experience that Barry Jenkins has devised. All of the pieces were finally in place and the reality settled itself into the Black American tragedy that has happened before, and now and for that matter, the future as well. For if we are unable to be viewed as equally worthy of life and love as our racial counterparts, will true freedom ever be achieved, regardless of the love we hold for each other, and especially when hope is lost?
Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk" is an undeniable work of art, filmmaking excellence, Black or otherwise, at its most resplendent.
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