A sorrowful and sublime tale of mistaken identity
If Beale Street Could Talk Cert 15, 119 min ★★★★★
Dir Barry Jenkins
Starring Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Aunjanue Ellis, Ed Skrein, Emily Rios, Diego Luna, Dave Franco, Pedro Pascal
Moonlight may have secured itself a legacy, for entirely nonartistic reasons, as the most scandalous Best Picture winner of all time (after the wrong winner was read out at the Oscars), but the richness of the film itself lives on. If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.
Just three films into his career, Jenkins has mastered a style that’s both fluid and amazingly precise. There’s hardly a scene here that doesn’t sing.
James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, set in Harlem in the early Seventies, holds up as a profound and vivid sketch of black lives, not just mattering, but interrupted. Jenkins has honoured it lovingly but also succeeded, without a trace of arrogance, in bestowing his signature. The mesh of influences on his style is so complex, singular and fruitfully intertwined that it would be hard to mistake this for the work of any other filmmaker.
The main characters, Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), are a young couple, deeply in love and newly pregnant, who must deal with the great crisis of their lives when Fonny, a 22-year-old woodworker, is wrongly imprisoned for rape. The explanation for this is deferred, even more than in the novel, but has to do with the spectre of racial prejudice, which Jenkins reinforces with some crisp bookending: documentary photos of police brutality and chain gangs.
The tone of the piece, though, is more sorrowful than angry. Jenkins devotes himself to extolling possibility, cherishing hope. And the flailing conflicts in Baldwin’s story charge this milieu up with a specificity that even outdoes Moonlight. Fonny’s family are called to a summit meeting, just after Tish has told him she’s going to have his baby. And this charged encounter – a highlight of brilliantly acrid dialogue in the book – turns into a
King is especially good, clutching at diminishing shreds of opportunity to right the course of justice
fiesta of name-calling and spite on screen, whose emotions reverberate through the rest of the picture.
Fonny’s Catholic family, especially his mother (a memorably severe Aunjanue Ellis) call down a curse on Tish for leading him astray: it’s clear, in some obscure way, that they blame her for his imprisonment, too. Her own family, who will henceforth commit to securing Fonny’s release as if he were their own flesh and blood, fight the couple’s corner with every tooth and nail at their disposal.
Tish’s mother Sharon (Regina King, in her best ever film role) goes on a mission to Puerto Rico, where Fonny’s accuser (Emily Rios) has withdrawn, in the hope that this emotionally distraught victim can be persuaded of his mistaken identity. The novel makes the point that Fonny is the only black suspect called into a dubious line-up by police, and credits the frame-up to a virulent racist called Officer Bell (Ed Skrein), who has a vendetta in mind after one unsuccessful attempt to arrest Fonny already. King, a reliable asset to dozens of more lightweight films over the years, is especially good and nervy in these scenes, clutching at diminishing shreds of opportunity to right the course of justice for her future grandchild’s sake.
Meanwhile, Canadian star James is a revelation as Fonny, approaching the glass for each successive prison visit with physical and emotional scars more plain to see. His wobbly attempts at reassurance tear you to shreds.
Jenkins’s directorial flourishes are much in evidence. There is a lingering romanticism and unafraid sexuality in this film that dominate more than any other aura. The whispered urgency of his love scenes are out of this world, their soft jazz backdrop filling the air with a heady perfume.
Just before their freedom is imperilled, Fonny and Tish are entwined outside – by twilight, not moonlight – on the Harlem street where they want to spend their lives. The film decelerates to a near-halt, as if to keep them cocooned right there. It’s as if they are holding paradise, before it’s lost, for every last heartbeat.