Though the film, like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” is driven more by the flow of experience than the mechanics of plot, there are plenty of twists and reversals. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a screen adaptation of a stage play that has been at once so true to the spirit of its source and so completely cinematic. Jenkins has adjusted the shape to the linear demands of narrative filmmaking, he has retained the original’s vital focus on Chiron’s inner life. McCraney’s play is a layered and fractured collage of voices, and while Mr. Chiron and Paula certainly suffer (and inflict suffering on each other), but they are liberated from the standard indie-film arc of abjection and redemption. In structure and tone, “Moonlight” sets itself against the earnest, austere naturalism that has become a default setting for movies about social misery. Jenkins is far too disciplined a filmmaker to turn his characters into symbols. The universe is far too granular and far too vast for any one of us to comprehend, and Mr. To insist that stories about poor, oppressed or otherwise marginal groups of people are really about everyone can be a way of denying their specificity. Nor do I want to damn this film, so richly evocative of South Florida that it raises the humidity in the theater, with the faint praise of universalism.
#Moonlight movie movie
I don’t bring this up to suggest that the movie or my admiration for it in any way “transcends” race.
Only after I had seen “Moonlight” for a third time - and only after a European acquaintance pointed it out to me - did I notice the almost complete absence of white people from the movie. Like James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” - or, to take a more recent example, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” - “Moonlight” dwells on the dignity, beauty and terrible vulnerability of black bodies, on the existential and physical matter of black lives. You might think that would go without saying by now, but the radical, revelatory power of this movie suggests otherwise. Nobody in Juan’s situation - or in Chiron’s or Paula’s - has ever been anything other than human.
Ali) humanize Juan is to get it exactly backward. But Juan, like a figure in a Kehinde Wiley painting (and for that matter like Chiron, too, in a later phase of his story) evokes clichés of African-American masculinity in order to shatter them.
The drug dealer as default role model for fatherless youth is a staple of hip-hop mythology, pop sociology and television crime drama. “And you sell drugs?” Watching him complete the syllogism in his head, and watching Juan’s reaction, is heartbreaking.īut there is much more to “Moonlight” - and to Juan - than this brutal double bind might suggest. “My mama does drugs?” he asked Juan at the dinner table.
(Though for someone who at every stage says as few words as he can, easy is a relative term.) That this comfort is purchased with the coin of his mother’s misery is not lost on Chiron. The tidy, airy house where Juan lives with his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), becomes an oasis of domestic stability, a place with hot meals, clean sheets and easy conversation. The drug trade around the Miami housing project where she and her son live is controlled by Juan (Mahershala Ali), who becomes a kind of surrogate father for Chiron.
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