Moonlight, a film doubly rare

Dozens of accolades have been heaped on Barry Jenkin’s comingof- age drama, the Oscar winner for Best Picture at last Sunday’s Academy Awards. It had been nominated for eight, winning as well Oscars for best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali and best adapted screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin Mc- Craney. Here is a movie that lives up to the hype. As a work of art it achieves what good work should: it moves its audience to empathy and love. This is one of those films in which nothing happens yet everything happens. It is structured in three acts, all following the progress of Chiron. We see him as a shell-shocked child (Alex Hibbert) navigating a world torn apart by drugs; as a frail closeted teen (Ashton Sanders) being bullied by schoolmates; and as a buff adult (Trevante Rhodes) who has re-invented himself outwardly, even if he hasn’t yet found expression for inner desires. Like Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (2016), which deals with gay life within the Korean-American community, Moonlight gives us something doubly rare: a film about a race not represented enough, and then a minority within that race. Yes, there are black people and some of us are gay.

I’ve been waiting too long for this. At one stage, when two stunning acts of violence occur, we are given a stark choice: be left devastated at the tragic consequences for the main character, or cheer loudly at poetic justice.

The crowd at studiofilmclub cheered. Trinidadians are yearning to see themselves onscreen and to live in a world where people aren’t taken advantage of just because they are gay or different in some way.

Still, Chiron pays a price for his actions. In the process, Jenkins subtly raises difficult questions about the criminal justice system—how its narrow gaze ignores wider social conditions and history. It’s the old determinism versus free will debate.

None of this should suggest Moonlight is a philosophical treatise.

Its strength lies in its singular focus on the human stories that populate it, including that of Juan, a charismatic drug-dealer played by Ali. Juan is haunted by a guilt that seems to manifest itself in the form of little Chiron. We learn Chiron’s mother Paula (an almost unrecognisable Naomie Harris) is one of the people to whom Juan sells drugs, effectively enabling the addiction that has torn Chiron’s life apart.

But while it does a good job of depicting black male experience, Moonlight struggles to shake the Madonna- whore complex when it comes to its female figures. They are either overwhelmingly supportive of the men in their lives, or largely sources of trauma. Paula is almost the Hollywood stereotype of a black woman: a crack-head veering out of control.

What redeems the film’s treatment of her are early and late scenes that give her layered complexity. (Harris has spoken about her initial reluctance to take the part, a reluctance she overcame when Jenkins told her the character was akin to his real-life mother.) While the film seems to fly in its first two acts, things slow down in its third. Developments essential to our understanding of Chiron happen, but much of the conflict is largely off-stage, reducing the tension. We learn that he has molted and become someone at odds with the sexuality explored in his youth. An act of fate triggers a literal voyage of re-discovery. As in Jenkin’s previous film, the wonderfully peripatetic Medicine for Melancholy, we see how the biggest moments of a life are the quietest ones.

And those quiet moments are truly stunning. Jenkin and his cinematographer James Laxon exercise restraint in their use of imagery. They give us the moon only once, but make it count in a stunning dissolve over the ocean. Composer Nicholas Britell’s score veers between stirring violins to Caetano Veloso.

In a marked departure from films such as Get Real, Philadelphia, and even the recent Bahamian films Children of God and Play the Devil, Jenkins dispenses with the standard tragic ending. This is not the place for the passion- infused horror of Brokeback Mountain. It is, instead, a lagniappe to James Ivory’s delicious Maurice. There is one particularly beautiful moment when Chiron takes a glimpse at a path leading to the sea.

He could go down that path to the raging waters.

Of perhaps he can stay on dry land and, with his beloved, learn to swim.

Bravely, he stays in the light.