The best film among the Oscar's Best Picture nominees, Moonlight glows like an iridescent animal, tender in touch and sensitive to the complexity of life -- black life, or masculine life, or black masculine life, or maybe just life. It's also a film about sexuality and identity, the two forces intersecting at the burning crossroads of race.
The protagonist is a gay man known by three names at three stages in his life -- Little, Chiron, and Black -- each episode of his voyage towards adulthood combined to make the film's elegant triptych.
Writer-director Barry Jenkins adapted the play by Tarell Alvin McCraney In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, and in the process creates a remarkable cinematic experience. Moonlight is in the discussion as much because of its cultural dimensions -- its portrayal of black men in the US at the time of #Oscarsowhite and Black Lives Matter -- as it is because of its svelte editing, delicate performances and shimmering cinematography resembling, among others, the painterly evocativeness of Wong Kar-wai's romance and Ho Hsiao-hsien's urban blues.
That Moonlight is likely to lose heavily to the bubblegum of La La Land -- harmless fun in an entirely different colour scheme, in short, white -- will only cement its reputation: the better films have never won the Oscar in a long, long time. The milieu is familiar. It is the rough, poor, crack-infested working class quarters of Miami where we first meet Chiron as a skinny pipsqueak (known then as Little and played by Alex R. Hibbert). His mother (Naomi Harris) is a hopeless addict.
At school the boy is bullied by those who sense that he's a little too shy in that world of macho-in-the-making. Chased and harassed, Little hides in an abandoned house and is rescued by drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali), a bigshot who takes a liking to the boy and soon becomes Little's father-figure.
"Am I a faggot?" Little bluntly asks Juan, something a boy would never ask his real father perhaps. Soon they go to the beach, Juan teaches Little to swim in a scene of emotional baptism that sets the course for the rest of the film: this is essentially a story of a boy who's trying to find out who he is and what he is in the world -- the often cruel world -- around him.
In the second part, Chiron grows up to become a gangly, meek teenager (Ashton Sanders). His mother is still an addict, and Chiron has only one good friend in Kevin (Jharrel Jerome). There's a scene of great vulnerability, a test of many boundaries between the two boys that ends with a brutal heartache.
Then in the final part, Chiron is transformed into a thuggish, gold-teeth gangster now known as Black (Trevante Rhodes), and his reunion with Kevin on a wistful Miami night is the film's crowning achievement in melancholic beauty and sublime editing. Director Jenkins gives black cinema a shimmer of sensuality hardly seen before in mainstream American movies. But his real success is the way he never takes an edge away from the social urgency and topical discourses that dominate the headlines in the Black Lives Matter era. Moonlight is film about a black gay man, but it's very much a film about poverty, drugs, and unequal inequality.
In Spike Lee's movies you see a demand for respect, you see anger and pride; Jenkins, meanwhile, hews more towards the European, or even Asian, sensibility of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together or Steve McQueen's early film -- a quieter, sensitive love story that keeps the undercurrents of social anxiety coursing.
In a way, Chiron's navigation of identity is a refraction of Philip Roth's stories about being Jewish in the US -- this time it's not the Jews but a homosexual black man, and while Roth's characters storm through the thicket of American life with rage, humour and cynicism, Chiron gets his education the emotional and pitiless way.
You may also recall the gay hitman in Marlon James's novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings, the trash-talking brute who finds his softer side between the sheets when he brings a man home. In Moonlight, however, the rough reality of life and Chiron's sensual nature aren't presented as a contrast: it's a negotiation of personality and feeling, one that he has to keep on balancing for the rest of his American life.
Moonlight
Starring Alex R Hibbert, Mahershala Ali, Naomi Harris, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes. Directed by Barry Jenkins.
