If Beale Street Could Talk
Starring Stephen James, Regina King,
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
[rating: 2/5]
Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’s award-winning film from 2016 about the life of a black man and the undying love he has for another, was a startlingly beautiful film. Featuring an all-black cast, Boris Gardiner’s horny tune “Every Nigger Is A Star” funked us into the glossy, colourful Liberty City of Miami where drug dealers, bullies, and drug abusing mothers resided. Scored by Nicholas Brittel and filmed by James Laxton, Jenkins graded the film with sensual colour and placed his characters squarely in front of us. He didn’t want us to just look at them, he wanted us to feelthem. Right into the camera they’d stare, smile, and sneer. It was a sensual film and the staggering revelation in the final moment bought us up short. We’d been as seduced by the grand love story as the hero. If Beale Street Could Talk is Jenkins’s follow-up, again visually beautiful courtesy of Laxton and again evocatively scored by Brittel. But, the moody approach that proved so effective three years ago is the wrong fit this time. This story, by celebrated African-American scholar James Baldwin, of two star-crossed lovers in 1970s New York, whose exquisite (yes exquisite) relationship is tragically knocked sideways, is a desperate and heartbreaking one. Disappointingly, Jenkins brings it to us with dreamlike imagery and a score that suggests we float, if not marvel, rather then participate.
Tish and Fonny have known each other since childhood and, as young adults, fell madly in love and luxuriated in the sensuality of autumnal Manhattan where their clothes match the falling leaves of Central Park. But then Fonny is unjustly accused of rape and once he’s incarcerated, Tish discovers she’s pregnant. This revelation leads to one of the best moments in the film when she invites her lover’s god-fearing mother (a terrifying Aunjanue Ellis), snotty sisters, and adoring father over to share the news. In one of the most electrifying scenes in any movie this year, its full of hisses, snarls, and vile accusations. Too briefly, it charges up the film and you could believe it’s the jumping off point for a venomous war but then the in-laws disappear never to return and we revert to Tish’s “soulful” observations about life and love (they litter the film dressed up as profundities). We know from an earlier scene involving an altercation between Fonny and a cop (the only thing this guy’s missing is fangs) that the odds are stacked badly in his favour and so a battle, at least I think it’s a battle (this film is nothing if not soothing), begins to clear Fonny’s name of the unsubstianted charge. The other great moment comes when Tish’s mother (the beguiling Regina King) emarks on a journey to Puerto Rico in an effort to gather evidence for Fonny’s case. There, she meets the woman who accused him of rape and for a moment, Jenkins removes the dreamy cinematography and remembers the story. It’s a revelatory moment and it drives the story to its breaking point but Jenkins fumbles it.
The problem here is that Jenkins presents us with a New York that is so sensual, he makes it hard for us to embrace Baldwin’s concerns much less the story itself, one that on paper, is a taut, infuriating heartbreaker. Baldwin considered that city to be a kind of hell on earth, a place of damnation where black people were deprived of any liberty. He was right. Did Jenkins have any interest in the core and purpose of Baldwin’s story or only its contention? In this era of bracing films about race relations in America, If Beale Street Could Talk is too beautiful for its own good.
