Barry Jenkins follows his Oscar-winner Moonlight with the moving, beautifully told tale of a pregnant black woman fighting for justice in 70s New York
Here is a film almost woozy with its own beauty and dignity, a film going transcendently high in the face of a racist world going low. It is a tribute of quiet passion extended to those lives fractured by injustice, and seems to serenely offer up their hard-won heroism to ward off bigotry’s corrosive evil. This is a great-looking, heartfelt and deeply intelligent picture from writer-director Barry Jenkins, an Oscar-winner for his previous film Moonlight from 2016. He has adapted the novel by James Baldwin about Tish (KiKi Layne), a young pregnant black woman in early-70s New York who has to battle for justice when her partner Fonny (Stephan James), the father of her child, is wrongly charged with rape. Fonny has been stitched up by a vengeful white cop (Ed Skrein) who was humiliated after a street altercation involving Fonny. His petulant authority was challenged, and he decided from that moment on that he just didn’t like Fonny’s face.
It could be said that If Beale Street Could Talk, unquestionably a work of real moral seriousness and artistry, nonetheless falls a bit short of Moonlight. It has a certain literary self-consciousness and it might not have the audacity and pure blaze of passion in that earlier film. There also are stylistic and tonal shifts that don’t quite hang together as cleanly as the tripartite structure of Moonlight. We get sudden jags and stabs of realist toughness, poking holes in the film’s plangent sweetness, which will then quickly heal up, helped by the rich orchestral score from composer Nicholas Britell.
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