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Moonlight

3/3/2017

16 Comments

 

A-
​3.80

A young man's life depicted at three ages.

Directed by Barry Jenkins
Starring Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Trevante Rhodes
​Initial Review by Phil Crone

Picture
We all have our criteria for what makes a movie a definitive A+.  It could be as simple as just being entertaining.   It could be because it has no discernable flaws in a precise checklist.  It could be quotability and rewatchability.  For me, an A+ is a movie that I keep returning to in my head days and even weeks later, pondering and re-analyzing scenes in my head, finding new takeaways and challenging initial conclusions.  I watched “Moonlight” five days ago, and it continues to permeate my thoughts.  By my own subjective measure, I believe that makes “Moonlight” an A+.  Ultimately, what “Moonlight” does so perfectly is take, on the surface, a very unique and unrecognizable situation and turn that into a universal truth.  “Moonlight” is a stark reminder of how much who we are is an influence of who came before us and our intensely human desire to belong and be accepted for who we are.

As Little, director Barry Jenkins establishes who will ultimately be key to shaping who Black is, namely his mother Paula and the drug kingpin Juan.  Little very likely gets his shyness and inability to connect with people from his relationship with Paula.  Little has never garnered acceptance or love, being seen as a burden and the target of Paula’s rage for the mistakes in her life.  Enter Juan, who finds Little after he’s been chased through the neighborhood by some bullies.  Juan becomes a surrogate father to Little, and it isn’t too surprising to see Little latch on to him quickly.  This is very likely the first time in his life that Little has ever received love and care from anyone.  Needless to say, the encounter between Paula and Juan while Paula is in the car is a bit complicating.  I latched on to Paula’s point to Juan when she anticipates that Juan justifies his actions by thinking “well, someone else will sell to her anyway.”  It’s an easy justification for him to make to do what he does.  For what it’s worth, I agree with Paula’s point.  This scene feels slipped in as a bit of a message that, even though our contribution to good or bad may not mean anything in the grand scheme, we still have to carry our burden of contributing to either the bad or the good.  Juan is, objectively, not a good man.  Would Juan have cared in the least about what Paula was doing if he didn’t have a relationship with Little?  I think the answer to that is fairly obvious.

That makes the final scene for Little at the table with Juan and Teresa all the more effecting.  I always say kids are smarter than adults think, and Little piecing together everything about Juan being a drug dealer plays out beautifully.  Mahershala Ali earns his Oscar in this scene, communicating his regret via terse answers and long silence.

As Chiron, we see the important effect of peers on shaping who a person becomes.  If the lessons learned as Little informed what he could aspire to as a man, the lessons of Chiron would be how to act as a man.  Chiron’s life at home and at school have both deteriorated.  Paula is now a full-blown addict and only using her son for convenience, willingly playing the “mom card” any chance she can get.  Paula continues to carry resentment to Teresa, whom Chiron has continued to maintain a surrogate mother relationship with after Juan’s death (which we can all assume the cause of, although Jenkins leaves it unsaid).  Paula continues to rant about how she knows best how to raise her son, which is – to put it nicely – an absolute fucking joke of a notion.  Chiron continues to be ridiculed at school, mostly stemming from a combination of extreme shyness and his mother being an easy target of abuse.  Chiron remains unable to defend himself from the ridicule, which is a daily occurrence at this point.  Once we see Chiron get knocked out by Kevin after taking a couple of solid shots, the transformation into Black is all but complete, with a (very satisfying to the audience) broken chair across the back of his tormenter punctuating the transition.

Initially, Black is unrecognizable from Chiron and Little, and that’s not just because he’s built a freaking brickhouse.  Black walks with confidence and has no issue speaking his mind to his underlings.  Black has followed in the footsteps of Juan, the only model of success he’s ever known.  He’s done it by being hard, the only way he’s ever known how thanks to the constant bullying.  Black is the unfortunate sum of the traumas of his life.  More than likely, the same can be said for his mentor Juan and his own mother.  While Jenkins is applying this to a homosexual black man, it’s a truth that permeates through all of us: we tend to grow into our role models.  Whether it be the woman with the abusive father that marries an abusive husband, the racist that grew up with racist parents, or the well-adjusted Libertarian who sometimes can’t understand why everyone else can’t get their shit together and gets annoyed by constant blame of the “system” while skating over the fact that he was born into an intact family and got dealt a good hand in the IQ Lottery, we are all largely who we are thanks to our role models at a young age.  In that way, I feel as if Jenkins is placing a partial blame on some of the issues in black community on a lack of everyday role models.  It’s great to have heroes like MLK and Rosa Parks, but without a tangible example in Chiron’s early life, the die has already been cast.  

While Chiron is very much the sum of these experiences, the same cannot quite be said for his best friend Kevin, who acts as a foil to Chiron for much of the movie.  We never learn much about Kevin’s home life, but we see that Kevin comes off like a typical kid who is primarily just blending in.  While Chiron spends most of his life struggling with who is, we never get that impression from Kevin.  However, that seems to be because Kevin isn’t trying to figure out who he is – he’s simply satisfying the basic needs of just having friends and fitting in.  We see the tragic ramifications of that attitude in the Chiron chapter, as Kevin reluctantly knocks Chiron out after goading from some bullies, just hours after the two of them shared a passionate encounter on a beach.  Ashton Sanders does a great job as Chiron here, communicating without words after Kevin punches him, forcing Kevin to choose over and over, no longer allowing Kevin to conveniently ignore him in school while Paula conveniently ignored him at home as well.  

When Kevin and Black meet, we find out some interesting things about both of them.  Kevin, unlike Black, has become his own man after prison.  In a weird way, prison was good for Kevin in the same way the military helps straighten out 18 year old knuckleheads.  Jenkins phrases the way Kevin speaks of prison as if it’s a rite of passage of sorts, in an intentional and nonchalant manner.  In this way, Kevin again acts as an opposite to Black in that he is afforded the luxury to learn who he is in a healthy way.  Meanwhile, we see Black immediately regress back to the shy Chiron.  It was a change I couldn’t help but appreciate – I don’t know about you all, but I find myself acting a lot more juvenile whenever I’m around my parents for an extended time.  It’s like you just slip back into that mindset.

We finally get the climactic scene of the movie, with Black confessing to Kevin that he’s never “touched” anyone else.  We don’t see much after this, but it’s a powerful scene that Jenkins deliberately leaves open to interpretation.  I’m not sure Chiron is a homosexual – I don’t think he actually knows his sexual identity.  The only advice he ever received on the subject was Juan telling him that he’d know when he knew.  Meanwhile, Chiron spends the bulk of his life idolizing Kevin and creating a persona for himself to fit into the only world he knows.  The final shot of Kevin comforting Black played to me like just the first step in learning who Chiron is, with this being the first time he’s ever actually opened up to anyone.

“Moonlight” is a masterpiece on the human condition on who we are.  We can be the sum of our traumas and perpetuate a cycle of despair like Chiron, or we can become better and learn who we truly are like Kevin did.  “Moonlight” ends on a positive hope that Chiron will ultimately do the same.  I will gladly revisit “Moonlight” in the near future, as I continue to think and rethink this well-crafted tale about a person just living their life, and while it may not be one I can relate to on a pure identity level, it’s truths are universal for all of us.
​

Grade: A+
16 Comments
Lane
3/3/2017 03:01:43 pm

Politics is like the 5th dimension of filmmaking. I do believe that when and where a film is made, produced, and seen—and by what audiences—determines the meaning of the film. This is a reader-response critical method of viewing, and “Moonlight,” I think, is the case in point as to why this matters.

First, let me say, I think “Moonlight” is a really good film. What it lacks in narrative it makes up for in technical beauty, character realization, and acting chops. Mahershala Ali is fantastic as Juan, as is Naomie Harris as Paula. The three young men that play Chiron also do a fantastic job of finding and focusing in on the aspects of the character that make Chiron who he is, so that while the physical resemblance between the three might be thin, you see a whole character present in each of the actors’ depiction. That’s not easy to do and it’s a credit to the actors and to Jenkins as a director of actors, that it works so well.

Jenkins does some amazing things with color and light in this film and the immediacy of the filmmaking—from his Steadicam tracking shots to his close up and medium shots—give the film a quality of visceral power. The way that Jenkins shoots the film encourages us not to simply observe Chiron and his world, but to participate in it.

All these are really good things, but I don’t think “Moonlight” is a masterpiece or was the best film of 2016. One of the best, sure, but not the best (and I know that’s always a very subjective, controversial thing to call anything “the best”). It wasn’t until I saw Rauol Peck’s great “I Am Not Your Negro” the very next afternoon that I realized why I felt this.

Peck’s film about James Baldwin really is a perfect companion to “Moonlight.” “IANYN” is the intellectual knock-out punch to the emotional body blows that “Moonlight” offers. What “Moonlight” lacks is a coherent argument for why things are the way that they are, and to be considered a masterpiece or a great work of art, I think this is a question that has to be asked and argued in any work of art. We come close to this understanding in the scene where Paula confronts Juan on the streets, but the scene comes and then it goes, and we’re back to the grueling interior life of the characters.

And this is fine. It’s not “Moonlight’s” fault that it doesn’t challenge the systems of society and reality; it’s really the culture’s fault for us asking it to. We (I’m speaking for white people here) need to understand why Ferguson happened. We need to understand why growing up gay in a place like Liberty City is akin to growing up in a war zone. The Academy deemed that “Moonlight” gave us some of that understanding, but I argue it did not. “Moonlight” achieved what it did because of the political 5th dimension that the film lives in. We (white people) needed a coherent understanding of why the world is a terrible place for racial and sexual minorities, and we decided “Moonlight” gave us that.

It was a beautiful film—technically and dramatically—but I still think “La La Land” should have won.

Grade: B+

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Bryan
3/4/2017 04:56:35 pm

"you see a whole character present in each of the actors’ depiction. That’s not easy to do and it’s a credit to the actors and to Jenkins as a director of actors,"

Well said. Good point.

"It was a beautiful film—technically and dramatically—but I still think “La La Land” should have won."

La La Land is beautiful technically and dramatically as well, but doesn't do anything to separate itself from any other movie. The hullabaloo over La La Land confuses me, and I'm a self professed lover of musicals.

Reply
Bryan
3/4/2017 04:54:06 pm

A shorter, urban version of Boyhood. Same grade. B+

This and La La Land are exact opposites, neither are Best Picture worthy.

Reply
Jon
3/4/2017 05:22:03 pm

What are some worthy Best Picture winners?

Reply
PaulH
3/4/2017 05:50:08 pm

Crash

Jon
3/4/2017 06:04:45 pm

“Was it [Crash] the best film of the year? I don’t think so.”

- quote from Paul Haggis

Bryan
3/4/2017 06:13:51 pm

Spotlight, Silence of the Lambs, A Beautiful Mind

Admin
3/6/2017 11:11:35 am

Replies to Phil's original review.

Reply
Bryan
3/6/2017 11:13:26 am

"For me, an A+ is a movie that I keep returning to in my head days and even weeks later, pondering and re-analyzing scenes in my head"

While I don't think this makes a movie an A+, I like this idea a lot. The most re-memorable movies for me in 2016 have been...

Hunt for the Wilderpeople
The Lobster

The Lobster especially. I'm not sure if it's because it is exceptionally weird or it really is that great. Maybe both, but the more I think about it, the more my grade climbs. It's the opposite of Frances Ha.

Reply
Jon
3/7/2017 12:36:16 am

The Lobster is definitely both exceptionally weird and weirdly exceptional. 2016 was a great movie year, but the distance between The Lobster and the #2 movie of the year is wide.

Jon
3/7/2017 12:29:47 am

The absent Shane said people applauded in his theater when Chiron hit the bully with the chair. Dude went to jail after that, justifiably so. He surrenders to bullshit masculinity there and pays for it with years of his life. So many movies are about breaking out of that cycle, and it sucks that people still thrill to seeing it indulged.

This reminds me of seeing Silver Linings Playbook in a crowded theater, where a lot of people laughed at every delusion that Bradley Cooper's character voiced. The guy was mentally ill, there's nothing funny about any of this. I'm on my high horse here, but sometimes I wonder if I'm watching the same movie as other people.

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Bryan
3/7/2017 03:46:22 pm

It's hard not be caught up in the moment of a bully getting his due. And it's not like this was quick revenge. When we get into the formal definition of bullying - repeated harassment, which you correctly used, humans naturally want to see that person taken down a peg, or ten.

Jon
3/6/2017 08:48:27 pm

The 2016 Best Picture winner is based on an unpublished play titled, In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue, a line that Mahershala Ali's character Juan says to young Chiron (Alex Hibbert) early in the film. Director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton use that hypnotic phrase as an excuse to bathe their characters in all kinds of light, produced by celestial and man-made objects, leading to the unique and entrancing look of their film, but the symbolic, emotional interpretation of that line is what thematically shines through. Chiron, one black boy of millions, is terminally blue in the depressive sense, and Jenkins spends his film asking why that is. The superficial answer is self-evident but Jenkins and co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney dig deeper, culminating in that perfectly blended mix of the specific and the universal that makes a great story.

The bare facts of Moonlight makes it a film that exists in one version or another. The gay coming-of-age story is a well-worn path. Moonlight hits all the highlights of this kind of film with the bullying from peers and adults, self-hatred, and first sexual experiences, and through just that lens, it's no better or worse than a dozen other similar stories. Black coming-of-age stories are less common, and black gay coming-of-age stories rarer still, so there's less a problem of iteration even as the hallmarks of coming-of-age tales are ticked off. Parents fail the protagonist, he finds mentorship from a neighborhood figure, gets his heart broken as a teenager, learns to open himself up as an adult. Despite the presence of formula in Moonlight, I don't mind it here because of who the story is about. Cinema is valuable because of how it gives windows into other people's lives, and there just aren't that many stories like this. The recent glut of films about gay white people have meant that there has to be some kind of gimmick if they really want to set themselves apart: the market for films about gay black people is small enough that telling an elemental story is fine for hearing from neglected parts of society.

Undertold perspectives notwithstanding, I'd hate to turn into the kind of liberal who praises a work solely because of who made it, like praising an art exhibit by a schizophrenic Lao transgendered elderly man despite it being nothing but a bunch of scribbles. The mentally handicapped Southeast Asian LGBT over-65 crowd surely has some talent in it, but that doesn't mean one can't call out nonsense when they see it. Some have criticized Moonlight for only being admired because of its identity politics, but I would strenuously disagree because this is a beautiful, affecting, and humanistic film. It sees whole people, unblinking towards the good and ill that they sow in their neighbors' lives. It shows how easy it is to be kind to a person, and how easy it is to be cruel. It's sociologically resonant, taking a Wire-level view of humanity where the drug dealer can be both a scourge and a patron, a source of corruption and inspiration. Moonlight has an emotional honesty that makes it easy for the viewer to attach themselves to the characters as they move through stages of their lives, never losing anything as the actors swap themselves out at each stage.

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Bryan
3/7/2017 03:49:18 pm

Who chooses Laos as their country of inspiration?

Reply
Jon
3/6/2017 08:49:02 pm

In its heart, Moonlight is solely about Chiron, a lost boy in desperate need of love. There's nothing inherently unlovable about him, but it still takes so much effort from those around him. Barely verbal after years of abuse, young Chiron requires patience from anyone who might give him the time of day, and he doesn't reward them with smiles or jokes or barely any reaction at all. He's a project, and one that his mother (Naomie Harris) has neither the time nor inclination to work on. Juan and Teresa (Janelle Monae) take pity on him, but it doesn't solve his problems. From a sad kid to a sad teen, Chiron (Ashton Saunders) is much the same, now taking to hugging his backpack out of an externalized hunger for affection. His bullies have aged right along with him, and now without Juan in his corner, he seems further isolated. A tryst with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) is filmed transcendently, but it doesn't last thanks to those bullies that will turn Chiron's feeling against him. Left only violent revenge, he dooms himself to years in prison and a future of crime. Now donning the physical armor of musculature and the metaphorical armor of a specific kind of stereotype, adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) thinks he's left the scared child behind until Kevin (Andre Holland) calls him up, instantly turning him back into the version of himself that's been hiding beneath the surface.

It's in that last act, and specifically in Chiron and Kevin's interactions with each other, that Moonlight achieves its greatest impact. Each movie in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, in which a man and woman are revisited every nine years as their lives progress, is great, but the last, Before Midnight, is my favorite because of its cumulative power, and though Moonlight plays out on a much shorter timeline, the same principle applies. Peak physical specimen Rhodes does an exceptional job playing bashful, and Holland is hugely charismatic, putting equal amounts of love and seasoning into the dish he makes for his old friend. Back at Kevin's apartment, in a perfect ending, Kevin waxes poetic about his love for his son, a boy who very well might share young Chiron's shyness and insecurity and aloofness, but with a father that speaks of him as devotedly as Kevin does. The final shots of Chiron being held by Kevin and a young Chiron, in the blue of the Moonlight, turning back to the camera sum it all up. If Kevin Junior could be loved, why not young Chiron? The lack of that love, which every kid deserves, is a long unfolding tragedy that might be remedied by the positive ending to the film, or it might be a brief moment's respite in a long and painful journey.

Moonlight demonstrates that every man still has the vulnerable kid somewhere inside of them. It's a choice to put that vulnerability aside. I get that it's harder for black men to do this, as American society emasculates black men at so many opportunities, making outward displays of masculinity an occasional last refuge and yet another poison pill the black community has received from the white one. Toxic bravado is something that's done no favors for anyone, making those forced to submit to it into worse versions of themselves and potentially making all those black boys feel blue as well as look blue in the moonlight. There's plenty of famous black actors who talk about refusing to play gay men. That's something that's largely unknowable to me, but what is knowable is that black LGBT people have worse economic outcomes than straight black people on top of a bonkers HIV infection rate (a 2008 report stated that if black America was its own country, it would rank 16th in the world for people living with HIV). It's a group that needs some cinematic representation, if only as a reminder that groups are artificial and people everywhere are people anywhere. A

Reply
Cooker
5/2/2017 11:22:44 am

Last round, so not going to spend much time (as if I ever do).

Great movie; had some minor issues with some of the cinematography (shaky camera shots), but enjoyable. A-

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