OVP: If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

Film: If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Stars: Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Finn Wittrock, Diego Luna, Pedro Pascal, Dave Franco
Director: Barry Jenkins
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Regina King*, Adapted Screenplay, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Barry Jenkins' last film Moonlight, was just a marvelous movie, and a picture that I named my favorite of 2016.  That sort of success, especially when you're not familiar with the director's other work (I have not yet seen Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins only other film, but it's definitely on my list), sets up a challenge though.  Inevitably, the "sophomore (or, in this case, junior with a little-known freshman year) slump" comparisons come out, and Jenkins used his fame to do something deeply ambitious-bring one of the works of James Baldwin to the screen.  Baldwin, the beloved novelist & activist, had never been adapted into an English-language movie before, and so setting the right tone for such a picture, combined with it being your followup to a literal Best Picture winner, was a pretty tall bar to pass.  The result, though, is a compelling movie that is not always successful, but surely gorgeous and distinct enough to prove that Jenkins is a major talent of his generation.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film's plot is relatively easy to get to, so I'm going to summarize, but we'll get to why this isn't the best lens to discuss Beale Street in a second.  The film is about Tish (Layne), a young woman who is in love and together with the young man who was her best friend growing up Fonny (James).  The two are separated when, after finally securing a spot for an apartment, Fonny is arrested on a rape allegation for a crime he didn't commit (he had earlier nearly been arrested for throwing a white man who had been harassing Tish out of a convenience store by a white police officer who eventually forces a woman to identify Fonny as her rapist).  Tish's mother Sharon (King) tries to exonerate the man who is to be her son-in-law, going so far as to fly to Puerto Rico to convince the woman who misidentified Fonny as her rapist to change her story, but the woman (who clearly was raped, just not by Fonny) is broken and screams when Sharon tries to touch her, making Sharon assume that convincing her to come back would be impossible as she is still too scarred from the assault.  The film ends with Fonny accepting a plea deal, and Tish visiting him in prison with their son, waiting for the day when they can reunite as a family.

The movie's approach isn't this linear, and aside from the final scene listed here, is not told in this order.  We find out first that Tish is pregnant, then move into her relationship with Fonny who is now on trial, and the scenes with Sharon trying to save her son-in-law are interspersed throughout some of the back-half of the picture.  Playing the movie more as photographs from a life rather than a linear story is a risky approach, but for the most part it works.  Jenkins employs a gorgeous score from Nicholas Britell, lush and brimming with cues to 1970's cinema (especially Chinatown), to carry us through these different transitions, and when they're on, they're fantastic.  King's uniformly good as Sharon, her character given two major filmic passages (the ones in Puerto Rico and the ones where she tells off Fonny's mother for degrading her daughter), and brings not just a warmth, but a sexiness & a sense of the woman she is even though we view so much of the film through the lens of her daughter's eyes (no child can properly understand their parent, a fact Jenkins highlights here).  And there's a terrific sequence with Brian Tyree Henry as Daniel, a friend of Fonny's who is on parole.  Henry is literally in only one scene, but puts so much fear and understood abuse (he talks in deeply-veiled terms about the violence he experienced from prison guards while in jail, but we know what he means) that it carries through the film, informing our understanding in the change in Fonny's demeanor and appearance for the rest of the picture.

I'm sorry to say this, but arguably the least successful aspect of the film might be the central character of Tish.  While the figures around her are left fully-fleshed, Layne keeps her Tish a blank slate, someone who it's hard to let into her world because she's our visual narrator, showing us the Fonny, the Sharon, the Daniel, that she sees.  As a result, we leave not knowing much about the actual central character of the picture, and she comes across more as a sainted mother than anything flesh-and-blood like the felt characters portrayed by her costars.  This wasn't the case in Moonlight, where an introverted Chiron keeps everything in, but the progression of three different actors give us a window into who he is as a person.  Admittedly this is also where Jenkins' approach to a floating camera, lifting in and out of different aspects of Tish's life, probably hurts her-it's harder to get a sense of who she is when we're taken to the next story, rarely having one interlude focus on her rather than just her relationships.  This makes the film, which I enjoyed but probably not as much as I would have, feel incomplete, like there's a chapter missing that links everything together.  But it's still so beautiful and lifted by the work of King, Henry, & Britell it's hard to fault it too much.