“Moonlight is a gloriously, painfully romantic film set in modern-day Miami, following the early life of Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a black gay kid growing up in the hood. Moonlight may be about as modern as a film can get, yet it's reminiscent of classic Hollywood love stories. Moonlight's days are infused with the hot yellow-white of the sun, at once beautiful and unforgiving, and at night, the deepest black of the sky framing the harsh glow from urban streetlights. Throughout are the bright colors of a fable, tiny splashes of aqua and red and gold, royal colors to remind us of ancient tales of romantic conquest. Thanks to director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton, the film boasts the confidence of long takes in everyday locations, lingering stills in a religious Renaissance style, and deliberate use of washed-out color and unsynchronized sound, knowing that these techniques could easily be blamed on the film's low budget, but doing it anyway, fearlessly, the film's construction mirroring the emotional growth of the young boy whose story it tells.
“Little, about 10 years old when the film opens, struggles with poverty, bullies, and a mother falling into drug abuse, while local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and fellow student Kevin (Jaden Piner) help him navigate a harsh world, in their way. Kevin kindly offers to help toughen Little up by teaching him how to fight; several years later, Kevin does it again, but not kindly, and not until after he and Little, now known by his given name Chiron, have had a fleeting romantic night together on the beach. The third panel of this cinematic triptych finds a 30-something Chiron, again renamed, this time as Black (Trevante Rhodes), driving his way back to Miami after an unexpected call from Kevin (André Holland).
“Just as in classic Hollywood romances, the characters in Moonlight move like they're in a musical, deliberately and gracefully, as the passage of time speeds up and slows down and the space around them bends and stretches, having broken completely free of the science that explains it, instead being powered by the sheer will of emotion. The old-fashioned romance genre is used in a very modern set of circumstances, where traditional tropes -- coming-of-age, lost love, loneliness -- are recontextualized within non-traditional realities such as homophobia, institutionalized racism, violence and poverty. The big minds at the big studios would surely have passed on such a tale, thinking that its themes would alienate most audiences, when in fact the opposite is true: Moonlight is universal.
“That's not to say the film bypasses cinema's past altogether. The adult Kevin is a cook at a diner, something that can't help but be a nod to the dozens of black actors who spent entire decades-long careers playing nothing but background characters in service positions. How many films came out of Hollywood where the only black character was a diner cook or a porter or a butler, who often didn't even have a word of dialogue? Hollywood for decades, and even to an extent now, has contempt for both the non-white actor and the real-world people in the service industry they play.
“In Moonlight, the adult Kevin, whose job at the diner is more about slinging hash than haute cuisine, is a success story, and that success story is both social commentary and a show of the character's strength. At the same time it acknowledges the scores of underdeveloped characters just like him in films of the past, chiding those films a little, asking how dare they consider this job some little nothing that never mattered. It did matter. It always mattered. And here we see, in terms that cannot be denied, that cooking is care and it is love, and you don't have to be of a certain Hollywood-approved demographic for that to be true.
“On the surface, Moonlight sounds like a social commentary film, and it is to a certain degree, but it's also a fine example of modern independent filmmaking that has been deeply influenced by the classics. It's the kind of film that would have been relegated to a specific genre not that long ago -- LGBT film, or black film, or indie film -- and to an extent, it's a bit of a surprise that it wasn't this year, but if nothing else, we should know by now that with Moonlight, the rules very happily do not apply.”~ Stacia Jones (originally posted March 5, 2017)
Note: Moonlight ranked #3 in the 2016 Muriel Awards.
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