‘Moonlight’ director and DePaul grad take road to ‘Beale Street’
CHICAGO — James Baldwin wrote his novel “If Beale Street Could Talk,” about young black lives in 1970s
Harlem united by love and divided by criminal injustice, in the spirit of a line Baldwin wrote in his earlier nonfiction essay collection, “Notes of a Native Son.” Each generation, he wrote, “is promised more than it will get,” thereby creating “a furious, bewildered rage.”
Writer-director Barry Jenkins concurs. “Mr. Baldwin wrote the novel when he was [angry]. Very.” And yet Jenkins’ film version of “Beale Street” is a paradox: a beautiful, poetic vision of a cruel time and place strikingly like the present.
This marks the first English-language film version of a Baldwin novel. (“If Beale Street Could Talk” was filmed in French in 1998 as “Where the Heart Is.”) Writer-director Jenkins, 39, initially considered resetting the narrative as a contemporary story.
“What Mr. Baldwin talked about in his time is now a commentary on ours,” Jenkins says, in a recent interview inside the West Loop’s Soho House screening room. “These issues of mass incarceration, manipulation of the judicial system, the disenfranchisement of young black men and people of color, these haven’t been addressed. Not really.” He decided to keep “Beale Street” in period, and to create visual corollaries to the lyrical Baldwin prose.
The film opened Christmas Day, and is Jenkins’ third feature follows in the auspicious, Oscar-winning wake of “Moonlight” (2016) and, before that, his disarming 2008 debut “Medicine for Melancholy.” The filmmaker’s tastes run the full international gamut, pulling visual influences from everywhere.
Most notably regarding “Beale Street,” the director has heightened his penchant for supple, direct-to-camera close-ups. Many, including Jenkins, liken them to the ones found in Jonathan Demme’s work. But the influences go back further, at least as far as Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), he says. In “Beale Street,” when the camera fixes on Stephan James (as the falsely accused rapist, sculptor Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt) and KiKi Layne (as his pregnant lover, Clementine “Tish” Rivers), the conversations take on a still, formal quality at odds with conventional realism.
With those signature head-on closeups, “I’m not telling the audience to judge these people in a certain way,” Jenkins says. “I’m removing my hand, so to speak, and inviting the audience to give in to the actor.”
Twice now, Jenkins has chosen a DePaul University theater student to play a major role in one of his projects. In “Moonlight,” DePaul Theatre School undergrad Ashton Sanders (who left for LA before finishing school) played the adolescent incarnation of the film’s protagonist.
In “Beale Street,” DePaul graduate KiKi Layne was three years into a busy Chicago stage career when she moved west, got a manager and found herself accompanying a friend to his audition for Jenkins’ film. She was there to read a scene with him.
I should be in this, Layne thought. She put herself on tape for Tish, and not long afterward Jenkins flew her to New York to read with Toronto native James, already cast. She got the part.
“Seriously! What’s up with DePaul?” Jenkins laughs. “It’s two-for-two for DePaul students getting the leads of these films! DePaul, Juilliard, Yale, NYU — at those schools, for whatever reason, the training is just so rich. Even though KiKi and Ashton hadn’t really done anything on camera, there was just so much there, something very rich and fertile. I need to go speak at DePaul!”
“Beale Street” concerns two radically different Harlem families, thrown together by Tish’s pregnancy and then by Fonny’s arrest, and conviction, spurred by the allegation of rape. Jenkins and company worked 25 days in New York; five days in the Dominican Republic, substituting for the story’s Puerto Rico segments (Fonny’s accuser flees to Puerto Rico); and a single day in LA, for a scene not in the novel. The movie’s epilogue, in fact, wasn’t written and shot until very late in an eightmonth post-production process.
The novel ends with Tish giving birth and Fonny behind bars. No one’s fate is spelled out. Jenkins’ shooting screenplay likewise featured “an ending that sort of drifts to a close,” Jenkins says. “That can be satisfying on the page. But all the way through [postproduction] I struggled with it.” As originally written, the final, ambiguous moments left people “broken,” Jenkins says.
So he opened his laptop. The new ending, he says, is “a realistic depiction of what I think the fate of these characters might be ... there’s a scene about eight minutes before that stuck in my mind: It’s when Fonny tells Tish: ‘I’m gonna build us a great big table. And our family’s gonna eat off that table for a long, long time to come.’” The final tableau, he notes, has mother, father and son sitting at a table. “It may not be the one he wanted to build,” Jenkins says, “but it’s the one they have.”
For actress Layne, now 26, “Beale Street” meant being the newcomer getting up to speed as quickly as possible. Working effectively inside Jenkins’ interrogative close-ups, she says, “was the thing I was most concerned about. For Tish, so much of what she communicates is without speaking. Seeing Barry’s previous work, I had some understanding of the intimacy he appreciates. He’s so patient. And he allows you to shine. One of my teachers once told me: ‘With the camera, all you have to do is think it. Think it, and it’ll come across.’ ”
Actor James, 25, likewise grew to love the performer/camera duets. “When you don’t have the other actor there to play with,” he says, “it requires giving without receiving. But I really dug it. Barry’s never in a rush to cut away from [the close-ups], and it gives the actor the chance to have all these emotions unravel in real time. It’s really for the audience’s benefit; it’s an interesting way to take out the middleman.”
Jenkins acknowledges the temptation with “Beale Street” to deliver a tidier, box-office-friendly resolution than the one found in Baldwin’s novel.
“Yeah, there was part of me that wanted to, you know, have the shot where the trial ends and everybody claps, and Fonny walks out,” Jenkins says, reflecting a moment. “Or maybe he’s coming out of the jail, and young Fonny’s there, maybe 12 years old. But for the young men who’ve actually lived that experience, I felt like it wouldn’t have done them justice. I wanted something hopeful but grounded.”
He pushed it as far as he could, Jenkins says. Any further, and “Mr. Baldwin would’ve hated it.”