Review of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) by Bertaut1 — 04 Mar 2019

Beautifully shot, but emotionally languid.

Based on James Baldwin's 1974 novel of the same name, If Beale Street Could Talk is aesthetically faultless, but much like writer/director Barry Jenkins's previous film, Moonlight (2017), the totality is considerably less than the sum of its parts. The biggest problem is the love story. Employing a Terrence Malick-esque esoteric voiceover, Jenkins lifts entire passages directly from Baldwin. However, what reads beautifully in the novel is badly out of place in the film, even in voiceover, and has the effect of rendering the two central characters unrealistic, with their love for one another idealised to such an extent as to become ridiculous.

New York, 1974; 19-year old Clementine "Tish" Rivers (KiKi Layne) and 22-year old Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephan James) are in love, and planning to get married. However, when Fonny is accused of rape, the victim mistakenly identifies him in a line-up, and he is charged and detained. Awaiting his trial, Tish visits him in jail, telling him she is pregnant, and promising she'll do whatever it takes to get him out before the birth. With this as the central framework, the story is told in a non-linear style, jumping back and forth from one time period to another.

This non-linear structure has an important thematic effect; we know from the second scene that Fonny is in jail, meaning that as we watch Tish and Fonny planning their future, there's a shadow over everything. For the most part, this contributes to the tone of the film. However, Jenkins overuses the technique. I understand why the film is told out of sequence, but not to the extent it is. Compare this with Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001), a linear narrative where he accomplishes the same thing with one out-of-sequence scene at the start of the film. Beale Street, on the other hand, jumps all over the place, never settling into a rhythm, with the cumulative effect one of distraction rather than immersion.

Aesthetically, much like Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk looks amazing. From James Laxton's vibrant cinematography to Caroline Eselin's colour coordinated costume design, everything we see rings true, and much like Moonlight, the influence of Kar-Wai Wong is paramount; seen in the non-linear narrative and relatively slight plot, the poetic tone, the centrality of music, and the tendency to use visuals rather than dialogue to convey thematic points.

As in both Medicine for Melancholy (2008) and Moonlight, Jenkins occasionally has characters speak directly to camera. They're not breaking the fourth wall, however. Such scenes are dialogue scenes, with the camera between the characters. It's a technique that was used most famously in The Silence of the Lambs, where each character looked into camera when speaking to Clarisse, whereas she always looked just slightly off-camera, setting up a fascinating visual contrast which encourages us to identify with her. Beale Street doesn't do anything as interesting or subtle with the technique, but Jenkins's tendency to use it during moments of heightened emotion does suture us into the milieu of the film.

However, a serious problem at the film's core is the love story, wherein Fonny and Tish just don't seem like real people, not in the way they gaze into one another's eyes as if they are seeing each other for the first time, not in the way they speak to one another as if every syllable is of earth-shattering portentousness. They rarely speak normally; instead, they adopt the eloquence of James Baldwin. In lifting sections directly from the novel, Jenkins forgets that what works on the page, doesn't necessarily work on the screen, and the reproduction of Baldwin's rich and lugubrious prose is simply unrealistic, with the delivery sounding stilted and awkward, and, most egregiously, far beyond the lexicon of the characters.

Another problem concerns the depiction of Bell (Ed Skrein), the racist cop who frames Fonny. Played as a leering pantomime villain, with bad hair, bad teeth, and bad skin, he's obviously a metaphor for the ugliness of racism, but he's so completely over the top, it rips you right out of the film. On the other hand, Regina King's portrayal of Tish's mother, Sharon, is exceptional.

Beale Street is an undeniably beautiful film that depicts the love between two astonishingly attractive people (it's worth noting that in the novel, Fonny's unattractiveness is emphasised). However, Jenkins's interpretation turns Fonny and Tish into a Ken and Barbie-esque couple. Taking a meditative approach to the material, Jenkins's adaptation never rings true. Whereas Baldwin's Tish and Fonny are flawed, contradictory, and relatable, Jenkins's protagonists are too-perfect-to-be-real, with every agonisingly serious pronouncement they make to one another pushing them further and further away from connecting with the audience on an emotional level.