The other day, before the lights went down at a screening of a new film by a director whose previous films I hadn’t liked very much, a friend in the same row (way up front) asked me, teasingly, “Are you excited to see this?” I answered, honestly, that I’m excited to see every movie, because auteurish expectations are no predictors: filmmakers sometimes suddenly find their cinematic voice and, after one or a string of less-than-accomplished works, come up with something that propels them to the forefront of the movie moment. When that happens, it’s one of the loveliest experiences of criticism—or, for that matter, simply of movie-going.
So it is with Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” one of the most emotionally ample and comprehensively created movies I’ve seen recently. I confess, I hadn’t thought too highly of his first feature, “Medicine for Melancholy,” from 2009, but it left me impatient to see what he’d do next. That film, about a romance between a young woman (Tracey Heggins) and a young man (Wyatt Cenac) in San Francisco, seemed like an effort to do what was already being done, but differently—to infuse the first-person experience of low-budget independent films with political ideas rarely addressed in such films, to blend intimate immediacy with an attentive aesthetic that thrusts the images to prominence alongside the actors and the performances, that makes mood and detail as vital to the experience as drama and spontaneity. “Medicine” reflected the desire for a cinematic naturalism that would be more than naturalism, that would fuse visual music with action and embed societal contexts into drama. The realization of the film left Jenkins’s large-scale ambitions at the level of intentions, but it nonetheless suggested a searching and distinctive sensibility that was exciting to discern.
Now, with “Moonlight,” Jenkins has realized his ambitions and ideas, embodying a personal sensibility in an uninhibitedly emotional experience that’s as much a matter of cinematic invention as of anguished sensitivity to his characters’ pain and drive. Working with a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and building a movie with a time frame that features three episodes spanning about twenty years, Jenkins creates a film with a sense of what James Gray calls “architecture,” with which the director keeps the many elements of the story—and, even more, of his complex and manifold responses to it—in a balance that highlights its many strands individually even as he interweaves them contrapuntally. It’s as much a marvel of observation as of ideas, of substance as of style, of intimacy as of reserve. Even though it comes near the beginning of Jenkins’s career, it feels like the fulfillment of an inner world that has been under pressure within him for a very long time.
The film tells the story of Chiron, who in the film’s first section is seen as a grade-schooler, nicknamed Little (and played by Alex R. Hibbert), who’s neglected by his mother (Naomie Harris), a drug addict; bullied by most of his classmates; befriended by a boy named Kevin (played by Jaden Piner); mentored by a local drug lord named Juan (Mahershala Ali); and nurtured by Juan’s girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). The vectors of these relationships run throughout the film, by way of the various characters’ presence as well as their absence. In the second segment, Chiron is a young man in high school (played by Ashton Sanders) whose friendship with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) becomes sexual and also leads to a shocking act of violence; in the third, he’s an adult, nicknamed Black (Trevante Rhodes), who is following in Juan’s footsteps and, after a long separation, reconnects with Kevin (André Holland).
Like any powerful idea, the concept of representation can be applied as a blessing or as a curse. As a reminder of responsibility, of an artist’s awareness that creation isn’t merely a matter of telling a story but of seeing the world and depicting it truthfully, it’s a blessing; as a critical practice of abstraction that pulls movies away from what’s onscreen and toward generalities, it’s a curse. Yet great movies, such as “Moonlight,” start off a step ahead of the critics who write about them: they build their mode of criticism into their very substance.
With “Moonlight,” that mode is an overwhelming specificity. It’s a movie about a young black man who is contending with the feeling that he might be gay; all of the characters in the film are African-Americans. Yet the subject of “Moonlight” isn’t blackness or gayness; it’s one man whose many qualities include being black and being gay—and whose own keen awareness of his place in the world, and of its implications, is the high-pressure, high-heat forge of his densely solid, relentlessly opaque, yet terrifyingly vulnerable and fragile character. Blasting aside conventions, archetypes, and stereotypes, Jenkins conjures the birth of an individual’s consciousness, the forging of a complex and multifaceted identity; he restores complexity to the very idea of identity, of the multiplicity as well as the singularity of being oneself—and he conveys his own primordial sense of wonder that art itself can conjure it.
The film’s specificity is inseparable from its almost unbearable intimacy—yet it’s an intimacy that Jenkins achieves through a directorial conception that’s as daringly spectacular as it is thoughtful and personal, starting with the movie’s very first shot, a vertiginously gyrating view of Juan, heading to a corner to supervise one of his young street dealers. This overwhelmingly inventive whirl wrenches viewers out of the realm of the ordinary and into a state of stunned consciousness and heightened alertness, into a world that’s both recognizable and like no other. That shot ends with a group of kids dashing noisily past the indifferent Juan; they and that agitation continue in the next shot, of the kids running through a field, in what seems for a moment carefree and turns out to be a chase, featuring the half-heard shout “Get his gay ass.” Then, the near-victim—that’s Little—finds refuge in an empty apartment that’s a drug den, and his pursuers terrify him by shouting and throwing rocks at its door and boarded-up windows. They leave, the boy is alone, and the sudden silence—safety from the clamor and terror of the world outside, momentary respite from persecutors—turns out to be a doubly unstable one when Juan, dislodging a window board, climbs in.
Just a few minutes into “Moonlight,” Jenkins has already created a masterwork, one in which the intensity of emotional experience arises from the nearly microscopic observational felicities that fill the film. Even passing details, like the ball of newspaper strips with which boys play as Little gazes longingly from afar, or the bath of ice with which Chiron soothes grave bruises, infuse the film with such tactile vitality that the viewing experience seems to come from behind the screen and affect the viewer physically. The film’s emotional intensity is all the greater for the fierce restraint that the actors—and the characters—display. (It’s exemplary of Jenkins’s art that, during an outburst by Chiron’s mother that terrifies him, her shouting voice is kept off the soundtrack.) The gestural precision and pointed verbal inflections that result are themselves a mark of worldly pressure, as if the atmosphere, political and societal, were reflecting itself back into the characters’ very fiber and joining their self-consciousness to a hyper-alert wariness. Without ever losing sight of the political phenomena that make Chiron who he is—including racism, homophobia, mass incarceration, governmental neglect, and poverty, in their immediate power as well as their long-term effects—Jenkins films them not as issues to be pinned to the screen in search of a rapid and ready response but as the crystallization of individual experience in all its impacted pain and ongoing struggle.
Here, too, Jenkins’s sense of a societal atmosphere is inseparable from his cinematic sense of an actual, even meteorological atmosphere. The action is set in Miami; that’s Jenkins’s home town, and he films it with a feel for light and heat, for the very choreographic implications of its urban geography, that makes a sense of place a central part of his characters’ sense of being. Jenkins wrenches the film’s images from the very core of his own being, filming Chiron and the characters around him as if from the inside; the sense of empathy and identification that emerges from the visual music of his dramatic images is itself a cinematic miracle. The fact that it emerged in his second, not his first, film is, among other things, a mark of the mystery of art itself. There is no formula.
