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January: Moonlight

My favourite scene in Moonlight happens right at the end. 

After a decade of not seeing each other and surprised at the change in Chiron’s physical appearance, Kevin asks, “Who is you, man?”

Kevin’s brewing tea in his kitchen. Chiron stands in the corner between the back door and the archway, always looking for an escape route. 

“I’m me, man, ain’t tryna be nothin’ else,” answers Chiron.

So Kevin contemplates his own life, about which he says:

Yeah, but it’s a life, you know? I never had that before. Like… I’m tired as hell right now and I ain’t makin’ more than shoe money, but… I got no worries, man. Not them kind what I had before. 

When Chiron appears in the frame again, something’s changed, communicated solely through the way he physically occupies the screen in the next few seconds - something Trevante Rhodes achieves magnificently.

“You’re the only man who’s ever touched me,” says Chiron, as he rolls back his shoulders, open and vulnerable and brave.

“The only one,” says Chiron, his chest puffing out, spine straightening, finally undoing decades of what Mahershala Ali called “fold into themselves.”

“I haven’t really touched anyone, since,” says Chiron, gaze fixed with Kevin’s, silently answering Kevin’s question from earlier, from a decade ago, from the first time Chiron questioned himself when that slur was thrown at him: 

I’m me, man. Male. Black. Queer. Ain’t tryna be nothin’ else.

I. Little. II. Chiron. III. Black. 

Moonlight is a three-chaptered masterpiece that follows Chiron through three stages of his life in the black neighbourhoods of Miami and later Atlanta. Adapted from the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Barry Jenkins gracefully delves into the heart of some of the most difficult topics in American society today: race, class, gender and sexuality. 

Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes achieve something beautiful and organic together in Moonlight. Wesley Morris of the New York Times puts it in better words than anyone else: 

Each of these actors spends a third of the film playing its lead, Chiron, time-sharing a single character. And each is fantastic on his own. But what they pull off as a trio - psychological conjoining - is even bigger than acting. (x)

And I see it. “There go that damn noddin’” says Kevin in the diner, “you ain’t changed a bit.” It’s true.

The way Black nods in front of Kevin, condensing every longing thought into a mute tuck of his chin, echoes Little’s quiet hunch at Juan’s dinner table, eating and eating and still embodying a hunger that food cannot satisfy. The way Chiron shrugs and apologizes and carefully blanks his expression when Kevin shares his experiences with an unnamed woman is the same as how Black looks down, looks up, licks his lips and responds to Kevin showing him a photo of his son.

The trio’s performance is something magical that leaves viewers breathless long after the end credits have rolled to a finish, a common thread that ties the entire film together, an integral piece to Jenkin’s vision of this film and fundamental to him achieving it. Or, perhaps put more simply, Hibbert, Sanders and Rhodes successfully occupying the same artistic creative space allowed viewers to go, “Oh yeah, we’re still watching the same black boy trying to figure things out.”

Which itself demonstrates the fluidity of masculinity, sexuality, and black identity. No matter how much Chiron changed in his appearance, his mannerisms, his occupation - those subtle similarities carefully maintained by the collective will of three allows viewers to contemplate how black masculinity and queerness is received in contemporary society by visually showing the many different shades of being Chiron embodies.

In other words, Moonlight follows Chiron’s story of “folding in” as he grows up in a uniquely difficult situation: on one hand he carries the burden of centuries of institutionalized racism, on the other hand he faces alienation as a queer man from his own community because of failure to conform to conventional norms of black masculinity. Most of the time, this “folding in” is done quietly, pinpointed as a few stuttering words, a single, lonely silhouette. Other times, it erupts loudly and violently: refusing to back up and stay down in a school yard fight, and a sudden, deliberate crash of metal and wood against flesh and bone. 

Yet, the most triumphant moment of this film arrives during the scene described above. All that folding in, all that self-constraint and deliberate disguise - over so many years that it must have become unbearably painful - unravels brilliantly in the confines of a small, clean kitchen.

"You’re the only one,” says Chiron, and nothing else matters aside from Kevin’s face splitting into a pleasant, satisfied grin. 

The story of Moonlight is undeniably black, but Jenkins tactfully avoids clichéd images of what comes to mind when we talk about the black experience in America. There are no direct shots of drugs, violence, and incarceration - only one very brief scene of Black pulling a gun from his car, a brief few seconds needed to establish the new reality of Black’s life at the start of Act III. There isn’t even direct depictions of racism - the only white people shown in the film are in the background during the scenes in the diner. They are offered no roles nor lines.

But the detrimental effects of all these factors deliberately hidden from view are plain in sight throughout the film.

Chiron’s mother Paula (played by an incredibly fierce Noamie Harris) is a suffering addict who turns Chiron’s life into a cold, hopeless hell as she descends into drug-induced paranoia and selfishness. Juan (Mahershala Ali, whom the world definitely needs more of in these uncertain times), a drug dealer who tries to salvage what he can of Chiron’s childhood innocence, passes away at some point during the dim of the screen that connects Act I and II, a no-doubt tragic interruption to Chiron’s life that reveals itself as a casual footnote during a conversation between Chiron and Guan’s girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe, aka Queen). When Rhodes emerges as Black in Act III - tall and built, confident but guarded, stepping through the bare streets of Atalanta like a shadow of Juan’s first appearance in the film - it’s easy to forget that he endured a decade of imprisonment prior to this moment, an experience that no doubt lent its hand in the hardening of his character.

By doing so, Jenkins presents the black American experience not through its moments of ultimate loss and despair but in the simple everyday scenes in which that despair seeps in and fastens itself to the very fabric of life itself, making it seemingly normal and acceptable. The quiet tragedy in that is what makes Moonlight such a haunting and heartbreaking cinematic experience for me.

And yet, and yet. Despite all this, against all odds: love still happens.

2017.2.1 (btw February is Black History Month) (If you’re looking for something way better written than this mess: Hilton Als’ review for The New Yorker is amazing and speaks from the perspective of a black, gay man.)