Plot Intro
A young African American boy in an impoverished neighbourhood in Miami called Chiron (Alex R Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes) grows into a man. His story is told through three segments of childhood, teen years and adulthood, and we see the developing relationships with his closest friend, Kevin (Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, Andre Holland), his drug-addicted mother Paula (Naomie Harris), Juan, a local drug dealer and father figure to Chiron (Mahershala Ali) and Juan’s girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).
Doug says...
We’ve seen Moonlight coming for quite a while now. When it first came out, we didn’t see it on purpose, knowing that it would be coming up in the project - and wanting to experience it fresh now.
Let me start by saying that Moonlight is a beautiful film, well told with good acting (and in Naomie Harris’s case: exceptional acting). I enjoyed the triptych structure, telling a life through the three key ages of Chiron’s life (i. Little ii. Chiron iii. Black) as he deals with life as an outsider who is most probably gay.
‘Probably’ because we’re not really sure what’s going on in his life. As a teenager, his best friend masturbates him on a beach, and as an adult he sees him again in a lengthy scene brimming with sexual tension. We see him go from scrawny terrified kid, to wealthy, ripped drug-dealer in a path that seems sadly inescapable. For a two-hour film, there’s not much in the way of plot. And while we have some good characters (Mahershala Ali’s drug dealer father figure; Janelle Monáe’s mother figure), most of these appear briefly in a scene or two with no through-line of their own. The only real exception is Chiron’s crack-addicted mother Paula who rapidly becomes the most interesting person in the whole thing - largely helped by Naomie Harris delivering a tour-de-force performance proving she’s far more than just the Jamaican Witch in Pirates of the Caribbean.
I think my main problem is that writer-director Barry Jenkins went on to make If Beale Street Could Talk and that is a considerably better film, despite not even getting nominated for Best Picture (one of the greatest injustices of the whole Academy’s being, in my opinion). In Beale Street, Jenkins takes Moonlight’s beautiful lighting, imagery and willingness to let a scene breathe, and adds humour, stronger characters and a more urgent story. It’s almost as if Moonlight is an early work and Beale Street is his masterpiece.
However, on its own it is a perfectly competent piece, if lacking the magic that is about to arrive in his later film, and while the characters don’t particularly inspire emotion or interest in their journey, they’re well drawn. I’ll also add that having a black director direct a black cast makes such a difference in terms of lighting. Black skin is different to white in terms of cinematic lighting, as several media articles have pointed out including this one by the Guardian, and to best light it requires different techniques. Jenkins clearly understands this alongside cinematographer James Laxton, as there is never a moment where characters are awkwardly lit, and the film uses beautiful, innovative ways to portray black skin on the screen. Much better than Crash.
Highlight
The scene when Paula and Chiron talk, in the third section, is beautiful. Harris is brilliant in her cracking, tired apology to him, and Trevante Rhodes plays off of her well.
Lowlight
I wanted more of the subsidiary characters - the school bully, the drug dealer’s girlfriend, they were all given tempting scenes that then went nowhere.
Mark
7/10
Paul says...
The 2010s have provided us with the longest string of high-scoring films of the entire project. Is it because they appeal to us as millennial movie-goers because they’re made in the most fashionable way? Or are movies making more effort to be innovative and high-quality in a world where more people are streaming their entertainment or getting better stories from TV? I’m not sure. All I know is the winning films now seem to be more understated, in-depth and unlikely. Argo, Birdman, and Spotlight were not favourites to win although they thoroughly deserved too over bigger-budget, more discussed movies that were competing against them. Moonlight, which also happens to be the Best Picture winner with the lowest budget of all time once adjusted for inflation, continued this trend by famously defeating the most-nominated film of 2016, La La Land (I don’t need to go into any further details about what happened at the ceremony, I think). Like the previous year’s Spotlight, Moonlight also didn’t win a huge number of other Oscars either - only Best Supporting Actor for Ali, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Plus, it promoted the Academy’s attempts to inject more diversity into the ceremony after tremendous criticism the previous year.
Did Moonlight deserve to win? Well, it’s certainly far superior to the atrocious La La Land, but I wouldn’t say it’s the strongest of the 2010s. As Doug says, the characters are well drawn but other than Chiron and his mother Paula, none of them really go anywhere developmentally. I think this is because director-writer Barry Jenkins is going for as close to realism as he possibly can and he definitely succeeds. The dialogue, the mannerisms, and the social interactions in a neighbourhood rife with poverty and drugs and pretty much entirely populated by people of colour are so different to what we are used to in films depicting just white people, that it really shows how a very different culture is actually very close to home. The sparse script is exactly how people talk to each other, not through grandiose, well-rehearsed speeches but through muttered, mumbling idioms. The unfortunate downside to this is that there’s no particular drama. I never feel any tension or build-up as the film progresses and it works almost like a documentary in its snapshots of everyday life in Miami. I would assert, therefore, that total realism in fiction actually makes for pretty uninteresting fiction. Where Jenkins’ next film, Beale Street, is far superior is in its stronger story, and its more humorous but believable characters.
Going back to the characters in Moonlight, I can only reiterate what Doug says, that Naomie Harris absolutely nails it as Chiron’s mother. The script emphasises that she does, indeed, love him very much. But her descent into drug addiction means that she shows it in the most unloving of ways and its no wonder that he is distant from her by the end (even she acknowledges that). Harris filmed her scenes in three days without any rehearsals (she had to due to visa issues), making her performance all the more astonishing. Ali and Monáe are also likeable as Chiron’s only real parent figures, but they’re not given nearly enough to do so it surprises me that Ali got so many rave reviews and awards for this.
Despite the lack of involving characters and storylines, Moonlight is nonetheless beautifully shot. It would have been so easy for Jenkins to just portray this neighbourhood as disgusting and decaying but he balances out the grotesque with a myriad of bold colours and camera shots that would rival the cinematography in Lawrence of Arabia. It’s also incredibly positive to see a film with no white people taking centre stage. The world, as a whole, is entirely multicultural but it is white people who, historically, have had the most coverage in the media and the most power, and it’s about time that the most prestigious and talked-about awards ceremony in cinema covers a wider range of humanity.
But overall, I’m probably not going to remember Moonlight nor rave about it. I would highly recommend Jenkins’ Beale Street which was unfairly not nominated last year as a better alternative.
Highlight
When Naomie Harris as Paula sees Chiron return from a night away, she seems genuinely concerned about where he has been and whether he has been safe. But as he discovers that she is locked out of the flat, and cannot find her supply of crack, it slowly and subtly becomes clear that she has darker motivations. A brilliant scene.
Lowlight
The final scene felt inconclusive. I suppose the idea is that we’re left uncertain about whether Chiron is gay or not. He is either craving physical intimacy with men, or some kind of male intimacy that replaces his lack of a father figure growing up. But I don’t think this was explored powerfully enough over the course of the film.
Mark
5/10
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