Author James Baldwin, 1970
James Baldwin, 1985
James Baldwin with other civil rights activists, 1963
Director Barry Jenkins
IF BEALE STREET
COULD TALK B+
USA (119 mi)
2018 d: Barry Jenkins
Every black person born in America was born
on Beale Street, born in the black neighborhood of some American city, whether
in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.
―James Baldwin,
epigraph from If Beale Street Could Talk,
1974
Even earlier than
the success of 2016 Top
Ten List #1 Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins had been busy at work for
four or five years adapting a James Baldwin novel from 1974, beginning in
December 2013 spending 10 days in Brussels writing the screenplay for Moonlight, adapting Tarell Alvin
McCraney’s play, then taking a train to Berlin where he wrote an adaptation of
the Baldwin novel, not having rights to either work at the time, but eventually
securing permission for both, playing a DVD of his earlier film Medicine
for Melancholy (2008) for Gloria Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s sister and
executor of the James Baldwin estate along with her daughter Aisha
Karefa-Smart, a film featuring two characters wandering the city of San
Francisco and talking through their lives after a one-night stand, a quirky,
funny, and independent black love story, both approving the idea they had found
the right filmmaker. Following the
novel, which is an ode to love that also comes across like a doomed fairy tale,
or a blues lament, the story is set in Harlem in the early 1970’s following a
19-year old black woman Tish, the saintly and overtly innocent KiKi Layne, who
seeks to clear the name of her 22-year old boyfriend Fonny (Stephan James), a
sculpture artist who is wrongly convicted of rape and sent to rot in prison,
unable to prove his innocence before the birth of their child. Rather than feel downbeat and defeated, they
cling to hope, where there is a palpable uplifting spirit guiding this family
even as they struggle against all odds.
In essence it’s an innocent portrait of black love, surrounded by darkly
conspiring forces that are anything but innocent, where the struggle to
maintain one’s composure and dignity is tested throughout, like the unending
trials and tribulations of Job, with no easy resolution at the end. The American criminal justice system is
filled with cases where blacks are wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not
commit, used like pawns as political fodder for law and order candidates who
vow to clean up the streets, which means arresting more black kids and filling
up the jails, as if the streets are somehow safer by overcrowding the prison
cells with black youth whose childhood and young lives are literally stolen
from them, habitually blamed for crimes they did not commit, which means the
real criminals are still out there still wreaking havoc. While this is the backdrop of the film, showing
how easily young black lives are destroyed by lengthy periods of incarceration,
where their real crime is poverty, as their families don’t have the money to
hire lawyers or raise bail to get them out, so they’re imprisoned even while
awaiting trial, serving a lengthy sentence where there is no presumption of
innocence. According to the Prison
Policy Initiative, “70 percent of people in local jails are not convicted
of any crime,” instead their primary infraction is that they are poor and
powerless. Often what happens is these
young men, who have done no wrong, eventually plead to lesser crimes than what
they’re originally charged with simply to get out of jail, as otherwise they’re
stuck in there seemingly forever, awaiting a justice that never comes. First and foremost this is a touching love story,
an idyllic Romeo and Juliet caught in
the wrong time and place, where the point of the film is to humanize those
affected, including their families and friends, creating empathy for others
like them, showing how pervasive and deeply rooted this problem is in America,
where there is no justice for racially motivated police crimes that
specifically target black youth, so routinely connecting them to random crimes
that otherwise would be difficult to solve, so they are easy pickings, made to
serve prison sentences for crimes many of them never committed, rigging the
system, where falsifying evidence, testimony, and fabricating crimes is a
corrupt police practice that hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years.
Not cut from the
same cloth as his other films, as this is less accessible and more artistically
abstract, and while drop dead beautiful, shot by his regular cinematographer
James Laxton, this aesthetic may actually overemphasize mood and art design
over text and social realism, where the authoritative voice of James Baldwin is
there, but the continual use of slow-motion, lengthy inner narration,
intoxicating visuals, enhanced musical moods, and often over-the-top melodrama
creates a different universe overshadowing the story, as it’s intentionally
painting an impressionistic montage throughout, where the artistic techniques
are extreme and overly obvious, with nods to the lush visualization of Wong
Kar-wai, where the jazzy musical score from Nicholas Britell is a nice
contrast, sounding like Terence Blanchard in Spike Lee films, with a
counterpoint using R & B songs from the era like Al Green, Nina Simone, and
just a touch of John Coltrane, while also using a series of giant Sirkian
close-ups that heighten the overall sense of artificiality, which at least some
of the time has the effect of undermining the film. In too many instances the tone is simply off,
not really in keeping with the worldly sense Baldwin provides, as Jenkins gets
carried away with providing additional texture that is at the heart of
Baldwin’s effusively descriptive prose, but novels create time and space,
allowing readers to contemplate what they’re reading, while film compresses the
whole into smaller individualized pieces, which is just too showy here,
choppily edited, altering the fluidity of the page, feeling more manipulative
than organic, and that comes from the choices Jenkins is making in how to best
express this material. It’s unfortunate
because this portrait of criminal injustice is among the strongest and most
socially conscious subjects in any Jenkins film, or any other film out there at
the moment, where it couldn’t be more relevant, but the seething anger that is
Baldwin’s voice is drowned out by artificial techniques that are not just
unnecessary, but get in the way, altering and minimizing the dramatic mood
established by the author, becoming something else altogether, saturated in
color and technique, overstylized, using the power of cinema to overwhelm, and
while it’s beautiful to look at, it lacks the sense of urgency from the
original text, which is at the heart of all of Baldwin’s works, which is why we
all read him growing up, as few others could transport us to such an intensely
compelling universe. Baldwin himself was
under siege when he wrote this novel, criticized by the Black Panthers,
specifically Eldridge Cleaver in Soul On
Ice, for being too effeminate, damning him for being gay, preferring the
fiercely emboldened writings of Richard Wright, pitting the two against each
other, undercutting Baldwin’s significance within his own black community,
despite an irrefutable record and lifelong career of standing on the front
lines protesting against racial abuse.
Baldwin lived most of his life after the age of 24 in Paris,
disillusioned by the racism and homophobia so rampant in America, making him
one of America’s most important exile writers, and one of its most thoughtful
critics, as evidenced by Raoul Peck’s 2017
Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro.
In a review of the book from The
New York Times in 1974 ("If
Beale Street Could Talk"), author Joyce Carol Oates wrote:
“If
Beale Street Could Talk” is Baldwin’s 13th book and it might have been written,
if not revised for publication, in the 1950’s.
Its suffering, bewildered people, trapped in what is referred to as the
“garbage dump” of New York City―blacks constantly at the mercy of whites―have
not even the psychological benefit of the Black Power and other radical
movements to sustain them. Though their
story should seem dated, it does not.
And the peculiar fact of their being so politically helpless seems to
have strengthened, in Baldwin’s imagination at least, the deep, powerful bonds
of emotion between them. “If Beale
Street Could Talk” is a quite moving and very traditional celebration of
love. It affirms not only love between a
man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in
contemporary fiction―that between members of a family, which may involve
extremes of sacrifice…
If
Beale Street Could Talk” is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based
upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless―an art that has not the slightest
need of esthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic
excesses.
It’s what Oates says
in the end that matters most in this film adaptation, “not the slightest need
of aesthetic tricks,” which Jenkins does not take to heart, so while this might
be his most gorgeously sublime work, it is also his most flawed. Told out of time in an ever increasing series
of flashbacks, one must affirm that some of the essential scenes are positively
riveting, including how the family is initially informed about Tish’s
pregnancy, announcing it first to her own family, and then to Fonny’s (who’s
already in jail), which erupts into a free-for all of surreal comic hilarity,
turning into a knockdown Saturday night brawl, as the two families have hugely
differing views on the matter. Regina
King is Tish’s mom, warmhearted and loving throughout, willing to do anything
for her daughter, even go that extra mile, which includes a trip to Puerto Rico
in search of the women claiming Fonny raped her, picking him out of a line-up,
which is another beautifully rendered moment, as both women are victimized by
the same circumstances, but in different ways, as blacks and browns are pitted
against each other by a white racist system that orchestrates the ruse. Both women demonstrate an innate sense of
utter futility, demoralized by the stench of debasement that might stain and
define them forever. Similarly, the
scene between the two fathers is equally intense, Tish’s father (Colman
Domingo) and Fonny’s (Michael Beach), each openly acknowledging no chance in
hell of getting the money they need to extricate their children out of a
hopeless situation, relying upon petty thievery just to stay even, where it’s a
blistering portrait of black masculinity.
Mirroring that scene is one between Fonny and an old childhood friend
Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry), recently released from prison, where there’s not an
ounce of artificiality here, describing the hell he went through and the abuses
he suffered as an incarcerated black man after being falsely accused of
stealing a car (though he can’t even drive), set to the background music of
Miles Davis Blue in Green, Blue in Green by. Miles
Davis - YouTube (5:37), an achingly sad expression of loneliness, perfectly
capturing a distorted criminal justice system that sends falsely accused black
men to jail as a matter of routine, where “they can do with you whatever they
want. What. Ever. They want,” with no recourse except to
serve your time, as the white man has you “by the balls,” with Daniel coming to
the conclusion that the white man may as well be the devil for what they put
black people through every day, intentionally destroying young black
lives. There are accompanying black and
white historic still shots of men on chain gangs working in the fields, with
white overseers armed with rifles on horseback, reminding audiences just how
long this has been going on. But there
are also hopeful scenes, even in the dim gloom of night, including an
impressive shot of Fonny working on a sculpture, cigarette in hand, smoke
slowly rising, all saturated in a golden hue, giving it the texture of an
illusory dream, the kind of thought that might get him through the day while
spending solitary hours in confinement.
When he and Tish were looking for a place to live, perhaps
unsurprisingly no one would rent to them, like a Joseph and Mary couple in
Harlem, growing ever more desperate, eventually taken to a vacant industrial
warehouse, where they have to imagine what might exist in a lifeless place like
this, yet it’s one of the most powerful scenes in the film, shown by a decent
young Jewish landlord (Dave Franco) wearing a yarmulke. When Fonny turns to inquire why he’d rent to
them when nobody else in the neighborhood would, he simply answers, “I am a
mother’s son,” preferring to rent his buildings to couples that are actually in
love. It’s the most hopeful counterpart
to the deluge of anguish and pain that defines this picture, beautifully
rendered as a whole, like an exquisite poem reaching out from the darkness,
calling from the heart.
