Third place:
Lily Gladstone - Certain Women [92 points / 15 votes]
Second place:
Kirsten Johnson - Cameraperson [98 points / 15 votes]
And the Muriel goes to…
Barry Jenkins – writer/director, Moonlight [125 points / 18 votes]
“Barry Jenkins' second feature, Moonlight, immediately cemented his status as a major American filmmaker. There are traces of Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien in Moonlight, the gorgeous colors and elliptical rhythms, but the empathy, as deep as the sea and as vast as the night sky, is Jenkins'. As is, most crucially, the specificity of Moonlight being about black Americans.
“There's a very long take near the beginning of the film, before the protagonist is fully introduced, in which Mahershala Ali's character Juan shows up at the trap to commence the day's pharmaceutical distribution. Noteworthy here is that a considerable amount of the shot's duration passes before we quite realize that that's what Juan is doing, as it begins merely as a shot of a man who could be anyone at all. Juan is bound to the past, manifesting in the present economic reality in which selling drugs is one of the only ways out of poverty, but the film allows us to linger, at far greater length than is customary, on what this man could have been, if allowed. Later, in an extraordinary scene, Juan's explanation to Chiron of the emotional weight and weaponization of the word ‘faggot’ bookends that moment of consideration. And Juan, despite the film's vast empathy toward him and being so fully realized a human being, is not even the main character of the film.
“Jenkins presents the protagonist Chiron, portrayed in each of the film's three chapters by actors Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes, in a fashion that's resulted in some lazy criticism of the film. To wit, Chiron does not speak much, thus the audience is not given his point of view in order to know how they're “supposed” to feel about him. Speaking, though, to the previous points about empathy—a word used quite a bit in discussions of Moonlight, for a good reason—I think the way Jenkins portrays Chiron is meant as a challenge, albeit a mild one, to the audience. It's asking film audiences to do something they rarely do but that should be a matter of course, which is to accept a dark-skinned black boy, adolescent, and man as a full human being. Moreover, to accept a gay man as a full man. The beauty of Moonlight, and Jenkins' masterful handling of its text and tone, is that the rebuke one feels at realizing that empathy for Chiron, or a Chiron, is a new or novel feeling comes not from the film or its director, but from oneself.
“The most encouraging thing about Moonlight, a singular and important film for many other reasons than the tiny sampling above, is that it feels repeatable. Barry Jenkins is real, and he is here to stay, and the best thing the film industry can do for him is to give him what he needs and get out of his way.” ~ Danny Bowes
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