Three movies that grabbed at the heart
These Oscar contenders are about race, but they’re also very much about love
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote American author Joan Didion, in one of her most memorable lines.
We also tell ourselves stories in order to know how to love.
And what could be more important in this often ugly and politically frightening time than stories that get us thinking more generously about love?
Not for me the shimmery musical fantasy romance of La La Land, which left me relatively unmoved. And yes, it’s now OK to say this out loud, defying the early critical orthodoxy that had the undeniably delightful Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling soft-shoeing their way to a pile of Oscars this weekend.
Instead, my three favourite movies — Hidden Figures, Moonlight and Loving — also up for some Oscar consideration — grabbed my heart in just the way I always hope movies will, but often don’t.
They deliver great storytelling, beautiful filmmaking and the sense that in seeing them I went somewhere important and have come back — to be completely uncynical about it — a better person.
These three movies are all serious explorations of what Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, in an interview with the New York Times, called “this massive topic of what the black experience is.” They also talk about love in very different ways. Hidden Figures, nominated in the best movie category, based on the eponymous book by Margot Lee Shetterly, is cleaning up at the box office.
Who knew a movie centred on a true story about three African-American women who excel at mathematics and science and overcome racial discrimination in the early 1960s to become essential contributors to the NASA space program could give action movies a run for their money?
Not the big boys in Hollywood, but hopefully they will learn from this.
Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae play, in order, Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked for the space agency in Virginia, hidden away with other black women in a room for “coloured” human computers, subjected to what was viewed then as commonplace racial indignities but seem outrageous nowadays — separate “coloured” bathrooms, a sense that they were invisible and inferior, both as women and as black people.
They helped launch astronaut John Glenn into space, were the first African-American women in their fields at NASA and were eventually recognized for it.
What about love? It starts with the gift each women has for maths and science, but also explores just how much they loved their work.
When Henson as Johnson, in a roomful of whiteshirted men enthralled with their own sense of genius, slowly moves toward a chalk board and reconfigures an entire space launch with her piece of chalk and her numbers, she’s not looking to impress. She’s in a state of flow that is utterly inspiring.
Hidden Figures is, as one reviewer pointed out, “not a subtle movie.” But it is a wonderful one. I went back to see it, and was struck again by the diverse audience — women taking their daughters to see it, men who love the drama of the space program, students of history.
Moonlight, also nominated in the Best Movie category and for other awards, is a far more artistically exquisite movie adapted from the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney.
It examines the heartbreakingly painful growing up of Chiron, a black — and gay — boy in a tough area of Miami that became for many inhabitants a human wasteland when the crack epidemic hit.
Chiron’s mother is an addict, and not kind about his sexuality. Chiron’s sense of forlorn solitude as he grows up — he is played by three actors as he ages — is almost too much to bear.
When a hardened drug dealer played by the amazing Mahershala Ali tries to protect Chiron and teaches him to swim in the ocean, it is a breathtaking scene of baptism and love.
The drug dealer’s compassion for Chiron’s sexual confusion is unexpected, Chiron’s trajectory is difficult to accept, and the movie doesn’t flinch in the face of pain, criminality and the futility of mass incarceration.
But the scenes that remained with me are deeply romantic.
My third favourite, Loving, details the true case of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia in the late 1950s whose defiant union was considered illegal.
After being briefly jailed, they reluctantly initiated a Supreme Court case that struck down the law that forbade such marriages — a precursor to marriage equality today.
With only one Oscar nomination, for Ruth Negga’s deep and quiet performance as Mildred, Loving disappeared quickly from the theatres.
Yet it too stayed with me, not just because it highlighted an important piece of civil rights history but because it was a poignant essay on marriage itself — its strength, its bonds, its endurance.
When the almost inarticulate Richard Loving is asked by his lawyer if there’s anything he wants the court to know, he replies out of the corner of his mouth: “Tell the judge I love my wife.”
The characters in these three movies, their search for validation, and the love they express, are unforgettable: love of work you excel at, love of yourself and whom you want to love in return, love in the face of rejection, cruelty, bullying and jaw-dropping bigotry.
Set in the not so distant past, Hidden Figures, Moonlight and Loving bring powerful messages about love to our troubled present.
Whatever accolades they win or don’t win this weekend, they are already triumphant. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson