A powerful but restrained performance: Mahershala Ali as Juan in Moonlight.
It’s difficult to write about a film that has already been so widely covered. Moonlight has racked up a string of awards, most notably Best Picture at the Golden Globes and Best Supporting Actor and Actress, which went to Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris.
You may have heard about the uncanny parallels between the lives of Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, and Barry Jenkins, who directed the film. Both were raised by crack addicted mothers in the Liberty City projects of Miami.
Perhaps you have been privy to the conversation about black masculinity and its portrayal in mainstream cinema as a result of the film’s success. Or maybe, on the contrary, this is the first time you’re reading about Moonlight.
I saw the film just over two months ago in New York, one day before Americans would take to the polls and initiate one of the biggest upsets in recent world politics.
Awards season hadn’t begun but the buzz was about Moonlight potentially being the best film of the year.
I approached the film with a dose of cynicism as I do with black cinema that white people like a little too much. I wondered whether I would be subjected, yet again, to a sequence of flickering images that fetishise and summarise black pain for the purpose of allowing the audience to feel that the emotional response in the confines of a theatre absolved them of the responsibility of dismantling the privileges that they enjoy (a direct cause of said pain) outside of the theatre. I committed to keeping an open mind.
The story, told in three parts, with the protagonist played by three different actors spanning from childhood to early manhood, is a personal account of a boy surviving the trauma of an upbringing marred by poverty and drug addiction. As the stark similarities between McCraney and Jenkins’ lives depict, it is also a story about a community where – despite the unforgiving circumstances its inhabitants face on a daily basis, despite surviving the violence of being forced into the margins and denied access to the tools that could liberate them from those circumstances, despite having the odds purposefully stacked up against them – the most basic of human interventions can ricochet a life hurtling towards destruction on to a new path.
Juan (Ali) is a dark-skinned Cuban immigrant and mid-level drug dealer who meets the young Chiron (Alex Hibbert) after he has been chased into an abandoned house while trying to escape bullies. In Ali’s performance that is as restrained as it is powerful, the shoddily constructed archetype of hood nigga is elevated without being sanctified.
Juan is no saint, but he is a whole man who loves and who is loved. The care with which this character is managed by the writer, the actor and the director speaks to an intimacy with the subject matter that no amount of research can replicate. You get the feeling that each of them knew a Juan, loved a Juan, were maybe hurt by a Juan and it’s in the meeting of the personal and collective memory that black cinema takes its position as a legitimate vessel through which the black experience can be reflected.
Much of the conversation about the film has been preoccupied with Chiron’s discovery of his sexuality, a journey he embarks on in the second part of the film. Here Chiron is played by Ashton Sanders, who gives a delicate performance that evokes the anxiety, alienation and confusion of puberty.
The film explores sexuality – the awareness of your body, what it likes and how the discomfort of this awareness forms much of the basis upon which we build our adult selves.
This is apparent in the adult Chiron, now called Black and played by Trevante Rhodes. He has used his body as a defence mechanism against any affronts to his particularly sensitive nature. This supposed discrepancy between what he looks like and who he is is beautifully illustrated in a scene in which he reconnects with an old friend, Kevin (Andre Holland), in the diner where he works.
Black has taken on the appearance of a stereotypical black man but it isn’t long before a slight disappointment causes the most acute flicker of pain in his eyes. It is a devastating display of control and internalised repression.
Kevin cooks a meal for Black. It’s my favourite scene, with no spectacular compositions but warmth, reflected not only in the lighting but in the familiarity between the two men who are enveloped in the cocoon of a shared secret and, momentarily, liberate one another through an affirmation of the other.