If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins (2018)
James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, first published in 1974, is set in Harlem, New York but the place in the novel’s title refers to an address in Memphis, Tennessee. Wikipedia describes the Memphis Beale Street as ‘the main entertainment district for the city’s African American population in the early part of the 20th century, and a place closely associated with the development of the blues’. (The song ‘Beale Street Blues’, written in 1916 by W C Handy, first became famous as a Broadway musical revue number a few years later.) As Barry Jenkins makes clear in the epigraph to his screen version of the novel, Beale Street also meant something larger to its author:
‘Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.’
It’s significant that Jenkins introduces his adaptation with a Baldwin quote that indicates the book’s premise (or at least explains its title) but isn’t taken from the text of the novel. The quote dictates the film’s tone and style. Baldwin tells a story that illustrates, through what happens to strongly individualised characters, scandalous and tragic aspects of African-American experience. The reader gradually perceives and feels the weight of the book’s themes. Jenkins, whose characters come across as representatives rather than individuals, imposes a tragic atmosphere from the start and the effect is monotonous. As well as the cast, insistent mournful strings on the soundtrack contribute to the unvarying register and tempo. Those strings raise suspicions that Jenkins is straining to replicate elements that helped make Moonlight a success. The scores for the two films are recognisably the work of the same composer but in Moonlight Jenkins used Nicholas Britell’s music more carefully and persuasively than he does here.
Baldwin’s novel is set in the early 1970s. Its protagonist and first-person narrator is nineteen-year-old Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers, who is carrying her first child. (All the characters are black unless otherwise indicated below.) The baby’s father is Tish’s twenty-two-year-old fiancé Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt. They’ve known and liked each other since they were young children; they are now deeply in love. Fonny is a sculptor; Tish works on a perfume counter in a city store with an overwhelmingly white clientele. Their future together is stopped in its tracks when Fonny is arrested and charged with the rape of a young Puerto Rican woman. At the start of the story, he is in police custody awaiting trial. It becomes clear that he is innocent of the crime and has been framed by a racist white policeman. The narrative describes, through Tish’s recollections, the growth of her and Fonny’s feelings for each other, as well as relationships within, and tensions between, the Rivers and Hunt families – the former tolerant and positive-thinking, the latter dominated by Fonny’s alarmingly pious and censorious mother.
Fonny’s white lawyer Hayward learns that the rape victim, Victoria Rogers, who’s prepared to testify in court that Fonny was her attacker, has returned to Puerto Rico pending the case coming to trial. Victoria too is pregnant. The novel’s dramatic climax comes when Tish’s mother Sharon travels to Puerto Rico to seek her out and try to persuade her to change her testimony. The latter attempt fails and, when Victoria suffers some kind of breakdown after losing her baby, Fonny’s trial is postponed. At the end of the novel, he is still behind bars and Tish is on the point of giving birth. The book’s last paragraph is:
‘Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.’
Turning the material into a film seems to offer a particular opportunity and a particular challenge. The opportunity is to smooth out awkward features of Baldwin’s narrative. For a girl with supposedly next to no education, Tish’s phraseology is remarkably polished when she’s delivering insights into love and life (‘The miscalculations of this world are vast …’). There are times when Baldwin almost admits to not finding a means of moving from Tish’s account into descriptions of events she didn’t witness (‘[My father and Fonny’s father], as we learn later, have also been sitting in a bar, and this is what happened between them’). The challenge is that the book stops before the baby has been born and without Fonny’s situation being resolved. Baldwin’s vivid prose guards his ending against diminuendo but a scenarist will be all too well aware of how anti-climactic it’s liable to be for a film audience.
Although Jenkins’s screenplay retains Tish’s narration, her voiceover is relatively rationed. She’s still occasionally more articulate than you’d guess possible from her scenes with other characters but this is less of an issue than in the book. The transitions to and from scenes that don’t involve Tish aren’t an obvious problem either. Until the closing stages, Jenkins’s adaptation is basically faithful to Baldwin’s plot; he naturally retains a flashback structure to describe the central romance. The pressure to take the story beyond the point that Baldwin ends it with works to the film’s advantage as a means of implying that the systemic racial prejudice of nearly half a century ago still disfigures American policing and administration of justice. When Tish’s baby boy is born, it’s hard not to think. he’ll be lucky if he fares better than his father did. Fonny takes a plea and gets a prison sentence. Jenkins shows Tish and their son visiting him in jail several years later. Over the closing credits Billy Preston sings ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’, to inevitably ironic effect.
If Beale Street Could Talk, although at last eloquent as a political statement, fails in dramatic terms in the nearly two hours leading up to its finale. Jenkins has encouraged his cast to speak their lines slowly and with self-conscious gravity. Most of the exchanges between characters have the quality not of conversation but of important statements delivered via overly considered acting, which gives proceedings an almost ritual quality. There’s not much sense of the vibrant cut and thrust of the Rivers family’s home life that Baldwin conveys – not least because the role of Tish’s clever and politically engaged elder sister Ernestine has been so reduced, and in spite of the fine work of Regina King (Sharon) in these domestic scenes. As Jenkins has staged it, Sharon’s visit to Puerto Rico and encounter there with Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) is unfortunately melodramatic.
There’s little surprise or development in the lead performances. KiKi Layne’s Tish and Stephan James’s Fonny always give the impression of knowing what’s coming. While Layne is occasionally affecting, James lacks the engaging, offbeat personality that Fonny has on the page. (The film’s Fonny always looks very healthy in prison.) In the book, the first time the couple sleep together is a profound experience for Tish especially. In technical terms, the love-making is a highlight on the screen too but the tone is different: Jenkins invests it with a mournfulness that predicts the tragedy to come and skimps on the episode’s exultant aspect. The only positively memorable bits of If Beale Street Could Talk – even just a few days after seeing it at the London Film Festival – are the rare tonally distinctive ones, like a sequence in which Tish and Fonny go to look at a loft they get to rent, courtesy of Levy (Dave Franco), the decent, mildly eccentric young Jewish landlord. The rhythm and playing of the scene are a welcome change from the prevailing studied solemnity of this disappointing film.
21 October 2018