Barry Jenkins (2016)
Moonlight is interesting in plenty of ways, including the technicality of whether Barry Jenkins’s screenplay is an original or an adapted one. BAFTA and the Writers Guild of America think it’s original; the Academy has ruled it’s an adaptation. There’s no arguing that Jenkins’s source material is a theatre piece – In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, by Tarell Alvin McCraney. The different interpretations arise from the fact that McCraney’s semi-autobiographical play, written in 2003, has never been publicly performed. The question of originality in a more substantial sense persists as you watch Moonlight but the film quickly impresses as unusual. Within the first ten minutes, Jenkins has introduced characters rarely encountered in the cinema by this viewer. A black boy is an outsider not because of his ethnicity (there isn’t a white person in sight throughout) but because of his sexuality (at this early stage, his perceived sexuality). A drug dealer is also a powerfully reassuring father figure. Moonlight is soon atmospherically distinctive too: Jenkins makes you feel extraordinary proximity to the people on the screen. He achieves this partly through conventional visual means of creating immediacy – a hand-held camera, close-ups of faces – but there’s more to it than that. The pacing of conversations – or attempts at making conversation – is such that you’re very aware of the often eloquent silences between the lines. The alternation between words and no words helps give scenes a texture of real life. It also enables that texture to override what, on the page, would read as sometimes clichéd dialogue.
The film comprises three sections (or acts) – ‘Little’, ‘Chiron’ and ‘Black’. The second refers to the protagonist by name; the titles of the first and third are his obviously suggestive nicknames. In each section, we see Chiron at a different age and played by a different actor. The child Chiron (Alex Hibbert) lives in a suburb of Liberty City in Miami. After finding the kid hiding from a group of other boys, Juan (Mahershala Ali), a local crack cocaine dealer, takes Chiron back to the home he shares with his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) before returning him the following day to his single mother Paula (Naomie Harris). After this first meeting, Chiron takes every opportunity to spend time with Juan and Teresa rather than with the emotionally abusive, drug-dependent Paula. At school, the slight, shy child has a single friend, Kevin (Jaden Piner), who tells Chiron he shouldn’t simply let himself be bullied. ‘Little’ reaches a climax with Chiron’s realisation that Juan deals drugs and that the boy’s mother is one of his customers.
In the second section, the teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders), although he’s grown much taller, remains uncertain and reticent, and his lankiness emphasises his vulnerability at school, where a classmate called Terrel (Patrick Decile) is the bullying bane of his life. Juan is dead now but Chiron still visits Teresa, who takes a more helpful maternal interest in him than the now crack-addicted Paula does. Chiron’s friendship with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) has continued. Kevin calls him ‘Black’. One night, after they’ve shared a cannabis joint and are sitting on the beach together, the boys kiss and Kevin fondles Chiron. Soon afterwards, Terrel forces Kevin – on pain of a beating himself – to punch his friend in the face. When Kevin reluctantly floors him, Chiron gets up. The rules of this brutal game require that Kevin keep hitting him until Chiron stays down; Terrel and his acolytes kick him, until a security guard intervenes. The following day, Chiron walks into the classroom, smashes a chair into the back of Terrel’s head and is arrested.
The third section picks up Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) in his mid-twenties. After spending time in a youth detention centre, he got into drugs-peddling and now deals on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. ‘Black’ is his professional name and appears on his car number-plate. Paula keeps calling Chiron and he drives back to Florida to see her in the drug rehab unit where it seems she’s now virtually resident. This visit, which ends with him tearfully and tentatively forgiving his contrite mother, is followed immediately by Chiron’s renewal of another acquaintance in Miami, after receiving a phone call from Kevin, who has also spent time inside. He now works in a diner, where the two men meet and talk. Chiron, who tells Kevin (André Holland) he doesn’t usually touch alcohol, gets a little drunk; they go back to Kevin’s place. Although he’s now a father, Kevin lives alone. He tells Chiron he feels he’s not done much in his life other than what other people expected of him but says he’s nevertheless content. For his part, Chiron confides that, since their evening on the beach together as teenagers, he’s never had sex with anyone. He and Kevin embrace. Barry Jenkins cuts to a final image of the child Chiron against a moonlit sea.
In the ‘Little’ part of Moonlight, Mahershala Ali’s Juan is, in every way, a towering presence. His absence thereafter is felt by the protagonist and the viewer alike, although Juan stays strongly in our minds, as in Chiron’s. Especially memorable is the sequence in which Juan teaches Chiron to swim in the ocean. This rhapsodic sequence transmits the nervous boy’s growing trust in someone both physically authoritative and humorously kind. Held in the man’s arms, the child submits to the water; the effect is almost baptismal. (It reminded me of the opening titles of the 1981 BBC biographical drama serial The Life and Times of Lloyd George – which, to the accompaniment of Ennio Morricone’s ‘Chi Mai’ theme, showed the boy David’s baptism in a lake.) The contrast between this and kingpin Juan’s last scene in the film is powerful. When Chiron asks if he sells drugs, Juan quietly says yes, looks down and weeps silently.
Alex Hibbert and Ashton Sanders, as the first two Chirons, are perfectly cast to ensure continuity between the boy and the teenager. That makes it all the more startling that the adult Chiron is physically unrecognisable from his younger selves. He wears diamond ear studs and a do-rag, and has obviously modelled his appearance on Juan’s. At first, Trevante Rhodes simply looks wrong but you soon realise that’s the point. Chiron has remade himself in Juan’s outer image; he’s followed the same career path but not the advice that Juan once gave him – ‘At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you’re going to be. Don’t let nobody make that decision for you’. Years of body-building have ensured that Chiron can no longer be accused of effeminacy but his muscular physique, like the gold grills on his teeth, is part of a suit of armour: Trevante Rhodes’s walk conveys the uncomfortable weight of wearing it. Well before Chiron reveals to Kevin that he’s repressed his sexuality, Rhodes has done a fine job of gradually revealing ‘Black’’s vulnerability. The removal of the teeth grills, during the diner conversation with Kevin, is just the start.
As a coming-of-age story and the tale of someone troubled by his sexual orientation, Moonlight has been compared with two other, famous American films of the last decade or so, Boyhood and Brokeback Mountain. Even though the comparison is understandable, the resemblances between this picture and Boyhood are superficial. The points of intersection with Brokeback Mountain are more substantial. It’s more than easy to believe that a physically timid and unprepossessing boy growing up in a tough area of Florida in the 1980s would have a hard, bullying time from other kids. Although it’s harder to think that a turn-of-the-millennium drug dealer in Atlanta would be as socially compelled to hide his homosexuality as a blue-collar worker in rural Wyoming during the 1960s and beyond, it’s also clear that Barry Jenkins wants to address the particular obduracy of black concepts of maleness and their implications for gay black men. The African-American writer Michael Arceneaux has written as follows in a piece on Moonlight:
‘Men of all races have [to] contend with the misogyny that births homophobia, but black men have to contend with a rigid idea of masculinity. These men think they are protecting black manhood when in reality, they’re merely serving as cheerleaders and puppets of gender rules derived from white patriarchy.’
Even so, the tragedy of Chiron’s self-imposed celibacy – and his solitariness more largely – is engineered. In ‘Little’, when Chiron asks Juan what a ‘faggot’ is, he gets a careful, sensitive and (given the time and place) surprisingly enlightened reply: ‘It’s a word used to make gay people feel bad about themselves’. Chiron then asks, ‘Am I a faggot?’ and Juan answers, ‘No – you might be gay but you ain’t a faggot’. Exchanging looks with Teresa, Juan goes on to say that Chiron will need to work out for himself whether he is gay. It’s crucial to the scheme of Moonlight yet somewhat contrived that, once Juan has gone from his life, Chiron, while adopting his boyhood protector’s surface and negative features, effectively forgets the things Juan said and did that might have proved helpful or fortifying. And though Chiron briefly implies, during his last meeting with Paula, that he’s still in touch with Teresa, this consistently sympathetic and stabilising element in his young life is conspicuous by her absence from the ‘Black’ section.
Kevin’s suddenly making contact with Chiron after years of silence sticks out as a similarly convenient device for making the dramatic climax happen yet the scenes between Trevante Rhodes and André Holland are so nuanced and intimate that they erase the doubts in your mind. The film’s climax, which eschews overt drama, is powerful and moving. (This is in spite of the fact that Chiron and Kevin are no longer so believable as contemporaries: Holland, who plays Kevin with great warmth and charm, is actually ten years older than Rhodes, and looks it.)
Barry Jenkins’s orchestration of his excellent cast is admirable throughout. He strikes an imaginative balance between showing the three faces of Chiron – all remarkable camera subjects – and showing other faces through Chiron’s eyes. On a couple of occasions, we hear a character’s voice as we watch a face whose lips don’t move: it’s a simple, vivid way of suggesting that what stays in Chiron’s mind from these moments is the way someone looked at him. This is only Jenkins’s second feature but he directs with a very sure touch. (It may be unfair to Tarell Alvin McCraney to call the touch alchemical though I can’t help feeling that the source material has been much enhanced.) With the considerable help of James Laxton’s expressive cinematography and a score by Nicholas Britell that combines hesitancy and fervency, Moonlight really does cast a spell.
21 February 2017
