Drama fades after a strong start
“The Photograph” begins with a charming and charismatic woman in closeup, being interviewed on video. In a bottom corner of the screen, we see the date stamp of 1989, and with just that opening — a face on camera — we want to keep watching.
The woman is Christina (Chante Adams), at the dawn of a major career in photography, and that opening scene announces the single great strength of “The Photograph”: the people. The characters are engaging, and writerdirector Stella Meghie is able to keep us interested in them for about an hour — and then the drama leaks out of the movie completely.
Even then, the characters are still likable, even if you’ve stopped being all that crazy about “The Photograph.”
The movie takes place in two time periods. In the presentday scenes we find out that Christina is dead, and that a magazine writer, Michael (LaKeith Stanfield), is doing an article in connection with a retrospective of her work. Meanwhile, flashbacks to the 1980s show that Christina grew up in Louisiana, but felt the calling to go to New York and make a name for herself.
Each time period becomes the story of a romance. In 2020, Michael meets Christina’s daughter (Issa Rae), and the attraction is instantaneous.
We also see Christina, a generation earlier, in love with a fisherman. But no, this is not a woman who’s going to sit around a tiny house all day waiting for her man to come home. So there’s tension and the guarantee of regret, whichever way she goes.
Meghie is so deft at laying out the terms of both these periods that, after about a half hour, the movie is on a glide path where she can switch from one period to another, back and forth, and we follow along, gladly. There are even some good laughs, thanks to Lil Rel Howery, who is quite funny as Stanfield’s older, married brother.
Then, it’s not as if something bad happens that changes the movie for the worse. It’s rather that nothing happens, or not enough happens and, gradually, a 106minute movie begins to feel like it’s standing still. It’s almost as if there’s not enough story to sustain it. For example, the tone and structure of “The Photograph” — an investigation going on in the present about events we see in the past — suggests a mystery story, that there’s going to be some kind of revelation.
But though the movie provides a handful of characters and makes us care about them — no small feat — it doesn’t make us wonder about them. It never makes us curious about the past. There’s no mystery we want solved, and when the big revelation comes, if you can call it that, it has no impact.
So the last 40 minutes of “The Photograph” is something of a snooze, but not an unpleasant one. Stanfield and Rae make an appealing couple, and Adams, a relative newcomer, is particularly impressive here. Somehow she is able to suggest, in her stillness and her bearing, that this unconfident yet restless young woman has the blessing and burden of a nascent greatness.