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If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
🕑 Added 2018-12-19 05:01:14 +0000 UTC
How can one adapt James Baldwin's prose for the screen? How can you hope to retain that hard, mournful poetry?
Unsurprisingly, the director of Moonlight did not attempt a literal interpretation. He retained the plot points and the simmering anguish and frustration, but found a tonal analogue in the films of Wong Kar-wai, Claire Denis, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Jenkins explores the texture of memory, the forgotten colors of kitchens and bedrooms, the way black skin glints under intimate incandescence versus institutional fluorescents. And above all, If Beale Street Could Talk is about faces, presented in close-up and straight on, addressing one another and the camera with a plaintive honesty. These are people who have every reason to have their guard up, and so the openness with which they offer themselves, and with which we are permitted to insert ourselves into their circuitry of loving gazes, is a magnificent gift.
And in a way, Beale Street is precisely about the systematic cruelty and racist violence that closes down that capacity to be unguarded in the face of the other. The tempered joy with which Tish's (KiKi Layne) family receives the news of her pregnancy is contrasted with the plight of Fonny (Stephan James) in jail on a bullshit rap. As his friend Carty (Brian Tyree Henry) tells him, the thing about prison is how they make you scared all the time, the dehumanization of it. And we see this gnawing away at Fonny during his visits with Tish.
Beale Street makes the psychological toll of jail time, and racism more generally, as strange and perverse at it makes Tish's family life grounded and glorious. Jenkins takes from Baldwin the outrage at white supremacy, and a generation of lowered expectations wherein daily horrors lose their sting. Who has time to mourn for the status quo? If we don't, though, how will we ever regain the humanity that's slipping away? If Beale Street Could Talk reinvests the everyday with its crucial moments of beauty, those perfect moments -- falling in love, your folks saying just the right thing, your lover looking at you the way that only they can. Barry Jenkins reminds us of everything good that racism strips from the world, and why it's such a complete fucking tragedy.
