Barry Jenkins Moonlight takes place in the ghetto of Miami, and it never lets you forget that setting. There’s the young drug dealer on the street corner by the housing project, and the bigger, tougher older guy who handles him. There’s a crack-addicted mother and there are tough thugs at the school. But Moonlight isn’t quite about that side of ghetto life. It may be the first film about poor African-American characters since the astonishing Killer of Sheep to take a different direction from the standard-issue ghetto and gang violence. More than anything, Moonlight is about kindness, and it’s a marvel how much kindness director Barry Jenkins – who had a very tough childhood himself – finds in this world.
There’s another major question that Moonlight opens and then reshapes. The lead character discovers that he’s gay – and in a most beautiful sense, the film isn’t about that in any typical way either.
The story of Moonlight comes in three parts, each about Chiron at a different time in his life. He’s first in middle school, played by Alex Hibbert, then in high school, played by Ashton Sanders and finally he becomes a fearsome-looking young man out on the streets (Trevante Rhodes). But Chiron’s character fundamentally doesn’t change. He’s quiet, so quiet that other characters, along with the audience, have to wait for him to find it in himself to speak. And it’s in those silences that Chiron’s delicate character emerges. As a boy, he hides from other boys who sense something different about him and attack him for it. A grown drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) finds Chiron in an abandoned apartment, sitting on the floor, his head in his hands in despair. But Juan doesn’t recruit Chiron, he takes care of him, teaches him to swim at the beach, and in a gesture repeated in every section of the film, Juan cradles Chiron’s head in the water as he helps him learn to float. The gesture is so beautiful and so tender that every time it appears, a sense of exquisite peace washes over the film.
Moonlight is a confounding movie – in good and remarkable ways. It sets up all the clichés of that stereotypic ghetto film, and then has none of them pan out. Juan and his girlfriend Theresa (Janelle Monáe) feed Chiron. One night, as usual, silent Chiron sits and stares into his plate. Out of the blue, he asks what “faggot” means, because children are calling him that. With some nonverbal help from lovely Theresa, Juan says softly that faggot is a word that some people use to make gay people feel bad.
Not all moments in Moonlight are this rich in sweetness. Chiron’s mother is an addict and he learns that Juan sells her drugs. For a moment, Chiron encounters a loving boy his own age – only to be horribly betrayed. In high school the torment of this gay teenager only grows worse and when skinny, inarticulate Chiron finally strikes back, it goes badly for him. But the thrust of the movie is to escape the horror and find decency.
Moonlight is a film mostly in blue, even in daytime shots. Juan, who’s from Cuba, tells middle school Chiron that in Cuba people say that the moonlight makes black skin look blue. Juan’s soft words come out like a blessing.
It’s a privilege to see Moonlight. Its resistance to the clichés of films about African-American’s is so strong the movie feels heroic. It’s director Barry Jenkins first feature film. He’s been a fixture at the Telluride Film Festival for a few years as the host in one of the festival’s main theaters. He does a classy, gracious job at Telluride, and he brings that deep-seated fineness to Moonlight. The movie opens its arms to the audience and invites us in – to see people who have to live in sometimes terrible conditions, but who are also capable of the best of what human beings have to offer each other.
