MOONLIGHT FEVER
It’s up for EIGHT Academy Awards, but this story of how a boy grows up in the shadow of drugs is not worth the hype
What an embarrassment it was for the american movie industry, which likes to think of itself as the Mount Olympus of liberalism, when the ‘ Oscars So White’ brouhaha erupted a year ago.
and how inevitable it then was that those voting for this year’s academy awards would ostentatiously recognise black talent. as so often, however, the Oscars voters have, in trying to right a wrong, got it wrong, not right.
the list of Best Picture nominees ludicrously includes Fences, a theatrical melodrama with few cinematic virtues, wildly overpraised because it is about the so- called african-american experience (and is directed by the mighty Denzel Washington).
Loving, an absorbing true story about an interracial marriage in Fifties Virginia, was overlooked by voters, but is in my view a much better film.
then there is Moonlight, which is also up for Best Picture and has had rhapsodies from the rooftops, yet is not the most compelling ‘african-american’ film even of the week. that distinction, and again I realise I’m out of step with most critics, goes to another film on the Best Picture shortlist, hidden Figures.
It remains unlikely that Moonlight, which apart from a couple of insignificant extras has an allblack cast, will pip the (lilywhite) La La Land when the most coveted of all the Oscar statuettes is dished out later this month. So maybe there will be further cries of outrage.
Nevertheless, it is a clear second favourite in the betting, and with no fewer than eight nominations, seems certain to loom large in the evening’s ritual backslapping.
Yet, while it, too, is a far better movie than Fences, Moonlight is not the work of near genius so many people appear to think.
It certainly contains some wonderful performances — not least by Britain’s own Naomie harris, playing a crack addict mother — but it is a frustratingly enigmatic film that never overcomes the obstacle writerdirector Barry Jenkins created for himself by making the central character so repressed and uncommunicative.
this is Chiron, played in three stages of his life by three actors. the reason he finds it hard to relate to the world around him, and the people in it, is that he’s gay, growing up surrounded by alpha males in Miami’s black ghettos.
When we meet Chiron (alex hibbert), he is just nine. he doesn’t know he’s gay and nor do we, but you should use the information as the very opposite of a spoiler, because unless you’re aware of his hidden sexuality, he is perplexingly withdrawn.
Why is he such a social misfit? It can’t just be because his mother ( harris) is so unutterably hopeless.
Only in the second chapter, with Chiron now a teenager played by ashton Sanders, do we begin to understand as, very haltingly, he comes to some kind of terms with his sexual identity.
In a more tolerant world it would be the least of his problems. With his mother increasingly a wreck and only peripherally involved in his upbringing, the proxy parents in his benighted life are the local drug dealer, Juan (Mahershala ali, who, along with harris, has an Oscar nomination) and his girlfriend teresa (Janelle Monae).
the irony of the kindly Juan supplying the very drugs that have ruined his mother does not escape Chiron.
Yet Juan fades from view and by the time Chiron is a man (trevante Rhodes) in the film’s final chapter, he is still on his own, still a stranger to intimacy.
then he seeks out an old schoolfriend, Kevin, the person with whom he had his first homosexual encounter, now working as a chef and a decent, caring man.
‘ You ain’t changed one damn bit,’ says Kevin (andre
Holland), which caused some suppressed giggling at the screening I went to, since the adult Chiron, thanks to some questionable casting, is totally unrecognisable from his adolescent self.
But I suppose the question is whether he has changed emotionally. Back in the mean streets of Miami, reunited with one of the few people who has ever understood him and looking, with his pumped-up body and gleaming gold teeth, like he finally belongs, will Chiron still feel like a misfit?
I shouldn’t reveal more, except to say that all this yields several touching moments as well as some powerful acting.
But an accomplishment for the ages, as some have claimed? Not from where I was sitting. HIDDEN Figures, which coincidentally also features Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae, is much more straightforward, a crowd-pleaser.
It tells a remarkable true story, that of three brilliant African-American women who worked for Nasa, then based in Virginia, at the height of the space race.
As mathematicians and computer nerds, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Monae) were vital in helping to send astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit, thereby advancing the technology that just a few years later would put a man on the Moon.
However, in 1961 their collective brainpower counted for very little in a U.S. state riven by racial discrimination. Theodore Melfi’s film explains, with a defiant lack of subtlety, how the trio had to fight to prove themselves in an overwhelmingly white, male workplace.
There is a satisfying scene in which their boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) finally realising that the reason Johnson keeps going absent is because the nearest ‘colored’ washroom is in another building, furiously takes a hammer to the segregation sign.
At times, however, the film plays like a checklist of injustices being ticked off one by one. Or in the case of Johnson repeatedly tottering half a mile to the nearest available loo, the same injustice ticked over and over.
Melf I further labours the point by making most of the white men, presumably top scientists themselves, downright obtuse.
Yet somehow it all works, so that when Johnson dazzles the boffins by telling them they need to move ‘from an elliptical orbit to a parabolic orbit’, I felt like applauding, despite not understanding a word.
And by the end, when pictures of these actual extraordinary women predictably popped up on screen, with a caption telling us that Johnson is still alive at 98 (and by the look of it, still firing on all cylinders), I know I wasn’t alone in wanting to stand up and cheer.