Review #877: Moonlight (2016)

Title: Moonlight
Year: 2016
Director: Barry Jenkins
Country: US
Language: English

Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight is a beautiful sensitive coming of age story told in three passages, each with enough power to be three distinct short films. The Director, Barry Jenkins, hasn’t served as the director on a feature-length movie in the eight years since the release of his acclaimed directorial debut, Medicine for Melancholy, in 2008. This film's success suggests he used those years wisely, honing in on his craft. 

Moonlight chronicles the life of a young black man from childhood to adulthood as he struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. 

Often Hollywood has a tenancy to summarize the "African American Experience" or "The Gay Experience" with too broad a brush, simplifying the lives of oppressed peoples and making their voices seem trivial. Thankfully Moonlight, with its poetry and grace, avoids broad statements and is a thematically-layered character study. Its writing is, for the most part, breathtaking. The actors who play the main character do a tremendous job at evoking sympathy from the audience. 

Through gorgeous lighting and raw cinematic imagery, often filmed by a handheld camera, Moonlight is able to make the film's most emotionally charged moments become even more visually striking. Jenkin's director of photography, James Laxton, make frequent use of closeups to further ensure that the scope of the film remains intimate and personal. The soundtrack can be jarring at times (ranging from Nicholas Britell's moving score to the rap-inspired Every Nigger is a Butterfly) but each works in the context of the scene. 

Moonlight is quite a creative accomplishment. Inspiring to its core, Barry Jenkins ought to be proud of his accomplishment. He must win Best Director at the Academy Awards and he MUST continue making films that speak to the soul of man. I'm certainly going to watch his previous works because of Moonlight.