A sophomore effort after your first movie is released to critical and audience success is always going to be difficult. When you've already set the bar so high for yourself, your next movie's anticipation is always going to be much higher than you're probably going to be able to deliver. We were all stunned when Jordan Peele gave us the phenomenal Get Out - and the dude won an Oscar for it. His next horror movie, coming out in March, is inevitably, in some way or another, going to let everyone down because no matter how good the movie is (and it will be great), it won't be as good as Get Out. Similarly, Barry Jenkins had an uphill climb with his second effort. After winning for Best Picture with the extraordinary Moonlight, his follow-up movie, while very good, doesn't really touch the heights that Moonlight reached. However, If Beale Street Could Talk is a near-perfect adaptation of James Baldwin's novel, and it shows us that even though he started so high, Barry Jenkins is here and he's making/made a name for himself among the Hollywood giants.
If Beale Street Could Talk tells the tale of two lovers who have been friends since they were kids. Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) and their newfound love/relationship. They'd always been friends, but now Tish at 19 and Fonny at 22, have discovered each other. Their relationship blossoms and they fall madly in love. They look for a place to buy together. They look to get married and start a family. However, all of this is told to us throughout the movie in flashbacks. This is because in the present day - Tish is pregnant and Fonny is in prison. Fonny is behind bars for a crime he didn't commit and Tish, her family, and Fonny's family are working to get Fonny out. But, it's not cheap. As the movie points out - it's really easy for a white cop to arrest and accuse an innocent black man, but in order to prove innocence, the system expects them to pay for everything. They have to hire a lawyer, investigators, etc. The money piles up, even with both families working to pay for Fonny's lawyer's services. Meanwhile, Tish, who isn't even 20, is struggling with revealing her pregnancy to the family. Her family is much more accepting than Fonny's, whose mother is devoutly and hellaciously religious. It's beautiful and painful what Barry Jenkins has done with the movie - show us this remarkable relationship grow between two very lovely people, while showing us how, for people of color, it can be ripped away from them in an instant and the system is rigged for "escape" to be impossible.
Tish narrates her pain throughout the movie as innocent a soul as the character she is. She's still naive and full of hope, but her hope is stifled by her environment. She explains why it's rare for the people of Harlem to get any leg up in the world and why this sort of thing happens all the time and even though it's agonizing for her and her family to go through - it's not surprising. There's a scene in the film that's difficult to swallow where Tish is in the grocery store and is being harrassed by a white man. As she ignores him and tries to get away, Fonny shows up and runs the guy out of the store - in front of a white cop. Fonny immediately pumps the brakes as the cop steps to him and asks what happened. When they explain the situation to him, the cop immediately tries to throw Fonny in handcuffs for assault. It's only when the store owner backs up their story as the truth that the cop, very hesitantly, lets Fonny go. The cop threatens to see them again - and wouldn't you know it, has some direct involvement with Fonny's arrest later that lands him in prison for something he didn't do. It's hard watching realities that we, ourselves (especially me, a privileged white male) have never experienced, but are very real and occur often to so many people. When Tish and Fonny's fathers turn to petty crime in order to pay for the legal fees - we get it. Tish even tells us in her narration that most of the men in Harlem end up turning to crime because when society constantly tells them they're nothing and can't ever achieve success - they start to believe it. These are the harsh truths Jenkins exposes in the film.
The thing that Jenkins does well - and he did it in Moonlight also - is he's able to make his writing sound unique. The movie feels like a novel. It doesn't feel like an adaptation of a novel to the screen - it feels like a novel. There's long, slow conversations. There's lingering on Tish and Fonny for steady periods without a word uttered. The dialogue isn't natural, but literary (yet, feels authentic for these characters). Jenkins is able to bring to the screen the images of the book you see in your mind when you read. That is no easy feat. He's also not there to make his audience comfortable. He doesn't want to ease your own anxiety when something in the film gets "too real" or too uncomfortable. Jenkins lingers on a shot longer that most would in order for the viewer to get squirmy and shifty. Because this isn't a comfortable story to tell. And he doesn't want you to feel safe either. He wants that pit in your stomach to feel worse and worse and never really dissipate, even when the movie is over.
The cast of the film is brilliant. Layne and James are perfectly cast and are marked with instant chemistry. They're supposed to have known each other since they were kids, and it feels like that right away. They're supposed to be more in love than any two people have ever been in love... and it feels like that right away. James carries with him an anger, one that's easily set off, but is able to quickly calm and resolve it just by seeing Tish's innocent face. Layne plays Tish with a calm and sincere naivete that breaks your heart with every look she makes. Regina King plays Tish's mother. She's magnificent. She should be in all the movies and win all the awards forever. She brings such a fierceness to the role with a underlying vulnerability that it only amplifies the heartbreak of the film. She's already won a Golden Globe for the role, and it wouldn't be surprising to see her take home a long-overdue Oscar. If Beale Street Could Talk may not have as deeply piercing an effect as Moonlight did, but Barry Jenkins still brings it with his follow-up movie. And like Moonlight, it's not an easy or a comfortable watch, but it's a necessary watch. Because Jenkins has a way of flinging harsh truth in a beautiful and touching way that not many directors before him have been able to.
B+
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