Director spotlight: BARRY JENKINS

Had already seen: none
Watched for this: Moonlight (2016), If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), Tall Enough (Short, 2009)
Have not seen: several shorts and television episodes, as well as one film I did not know about, Medicine for Melancholy

There is a way in which it feels right to pair Jenkins with Coogler. Their career timelines are roughly parallel, even though they come from opposite coasts.

Their styles are quite different. Coogler was consistently entertaining; Jenkins requires more work.

His films move slowly, perhaps a better fit for the art house than the cineplex. I would almost say the right comparison is Terrence Malick, but when I watched a Malick film, I just kept waiting for things to happen, and later when I remembered it, still wondered why you would intentionally make a film that slow and irritating. It is not like that watching Jenkins.

First of all, things do happen, sometimes shockingly. More than that, though, there are always layers of meaning that come back to you later. Oh, that was because of this. Of course it would have meant that.

The situations that the characters have to deal with involve great wrongs and heartbreak; that can't be avoided. Signs of hope still appear, and when they do they are because of love and human kindness.

Moonlight was the most interesting for that. Structured in three acts, each act has the main character (Chiron) at a different age, played by a different actor, and is titled with a different name that the character is going or has gone by (so not always Chiron but I will refer to him as that for consistency). Early on, Juan (Mahershala Ali in an Oscar-winning performance) tells Chiron that you can't let other people decide who you are. Chiron is called "Little" at the time, and picked on for that, and called another slur that you don't even hear him say, even though you know what it is.

That leads to one of the most frustrating things about the film. Spoilers follow, but they aren't major spoilers for a little while longer, so I will put another notice there.

It feels like all I had heard before seeing the film was about gay sex, and that is what I was asked about after I saw it. That should not have been that big of a deal.

The scene was short, and less graphic than the sex scene in Say Anything, a classic teen film from 1989. It was less graphic than a scene in a PG-13 film I saw last week.

It's not that I can't believe that people got hung up on that; I am familiar with people. I am disturbed at how much was missed by focusing on that.

It is a huge thing that the brief act there was the only intimacy that Chiron had ever experienced. It is a big deal to see how Chiron chooses to embrace masculinity and what he thinks that means, and what life that leads him too. It is tragic.

That tragedy is not separate from a world where people see a nuanced portrayal of how childhood conditions influence adulthood and come away thinking "gay sex".

Here are the things that really stayed with me, and thus the real spoilers.

One really powerful thing for me happened after a confrontation between Chiron's mother and Juan. Juan berates her for her neglect and drug use and she counters that his drug dealing enables her. After that you do not see Juan again. It is not that Chiron never saw Juan again, but the audience does not see it, and that stark cutoff that is felt. Despite all the encouragement and the food and the safe bed when needed, Juan is a part of the bad conditions that hurt Chiron. That limits how much of a positive influence he can be.

It is easy to believe that Juan would never tell Chiron to attack his bully (that was a shocking moment), or want him to become a really pumped drug dealer, but those things happen and by his own life choices Juan has no ability to prevent it.

I also keep coming back to two scenes between Chiron and his mother Paula. In one, she is happy to see him when he arrives home from school and speaks affectionately. He is so shocked, and vulnerably hopeful, but she is really hoping for some cash off of him in pursuit of her next high. (Also, I think she had locked herself out.) I hurt for him, to want that love so badly, and to not be able to get it. That is why the other scene keeps coming back, when she apologizes for not loving him when he needed it.

If I say it was a powerful scene, that sounds like it was a moment of great reconciliation and catharsis. It was more sad. She apologizes, she would like to do better, and he does not reject the apology, but can it be enough? What does enough look like, after all that has happened?

I don't even know, but I want that child to be loved and to feel loved. I want that teenager to be loved and feel loved. Does that mean I want that drug dealer to be loved and to feel it? He needed it more then, or at least maybe he deserved it more, but if he had gotten the love then... and that's what lingers. Sadness, and compassion, and still some hope.