Barry Jenkins’s Sharp and Tender “If Beale Street Could Talk”

I regret not having the time right now for more than these brief notes on Barry Jenkins’s new work, his adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which is a wondrous movie and a stirring, almost painful experience to watch. Jenkins’s last movie was Moonlight, which will never be forgotten by anyone who’s seen it. After seeing that movie and going back to the theatre a number of times for repeat viewings, I wrote that I was immensely encouraged as I anticipated Jenkins’s coming masterpieces; now, I can tell you that If Beale Street Could Talk seems like the fulfillment of an impossible promise. Jenkins’s style is now instantly recognisable, in the slow, glowing, sensual tactility of his images, and in the deeply resounding, sharp yet opaque emotional resonances they evoke.

I have another regret, which is that I didn’t get to read Baldwin’s novel before seeing the movie. As soon as I heard about its release last year, I went through every library and book shop in the area looking for it, but came up short. Now, besides Jenkins’s cinematic conception and execution, I have much to praise about how the story is set up and the characters placed to lay out particular ideas, and I don’t know where to give credit. I’ve read Baldwin’s essays with great admiration; what we call fervour in other authors is more like fire in Baldwin, and I still remember how right it felt when I read Harold Bloom calling him a direct descendant of the prophetic lineage of Jeremiah. Bloom also memorably wrote, “Unlike Emerson, Baldwin lacks the luxury of detachment, since he speaks … for a sexual minority within a racial minority, indeed for an aesthetic minority among black homosexuals. Ultimately, Baldwin’s dilemma … is that he’s a minority of one, a solitary voice breaking forth against himself from within himself.” By that description, and knowing what Jenkins wrought in Moonlight, it’s difficult to imagine an author whose material would be more apt for Jenkins, who also works to invert the difficulties of outwardness, and bring forth his, his story, and his characters’ full immense inwardness, in all of its vulnerability and splendour.

I can try, but probably won’t succeed, to improve upon Doreen St. Félix’s description of Jenkins’s “project, in Beale Street and in Moonlight before it, being: to create portraits of black love that are highly stylised but not aloof, politically urgent but not aimed at anything as basic as correcting a stereotype.” Set in Harlem in the early 1970s, it follows two young people, Tish (aged 19) and Alfonso, or Fonny (22), who grew up together and from whose close and intimate friendship burst a passionate romantic love. They move in together before being married (which, as is explained, matters more to him than to her); but their domestic bliss is cut short when a Puerto Rican woman falsely accuses him of rape, at the direction of a white policeman with a personal vendetta. While Fonny is in prison and waiting for his trial, Tish informs him, and then both their families, that she’s expecting their child. Most of the plot unfolds during Tish’s pregnancy, while she and her family work with a lawyer to find ways of proving Fonny’s innocence, with flashbacks to their childhood, their blossoming romance, and some moments of their shared lives before Fonny’s arrest.

Kiki Layne plays Tish with a tremulous fragility that gives way to a warm, glowing resilience. Stephan James renders Fonny as vulnerable, assured, constant, and sensitive; he’s frightened and distressed by prison, he’s confident and proud (Jenkins subtly reminds viewers that, even among empathetic, sensitive people, society in the 70s was still more harshly gendered than today), and he’s anchored in his love for Tish. Two brief appearances that remained much longer in my mind than on the screen were by the always solid and reassuring Colman Domingo, as Tish’s nurturing father, and the taut and febrile Aunjanue Ellis, who appears in only one scene as Fonny’s bitterly discontented and coldly devout mother. The outlier in the cast is Regina King, who plays both a smart mom and a wise mother to Tish. I’m glad and gratified to hear of King’s probable Oscar success for this movie — she’s long been a favourite actor of mine, with excellent comedic abilities, vital onscreen charisma, credible real-woman intelligence, and a vibrant emotional immediacy. But, somehow, she didn’t seem to quite fit in to this movie. King has a certain contemporary awareness and distinctly modern presence; she put on the right accent for the part, and moves through the scenes with a natural ease, but she sounds like a mom from 2018 speaking to a daughter in 1974, albeit one with the full weight of lived experience and wisdom behind her words. King’s most engrossing moment is when her character steps wrong and loses her calm grip of control, when she visits Fonny’s accuser in Puerto Rico.

A lot of the story is set up by Tish’s voice over, as well as what I assume are parts of Baldwin’s text in the novel, which sometimes poetically describe her feelings for Fonny, and which sometimes bring a sharp, essayistic criticism of American society and injustice within the fictional story’s framework. This specific part of the voice over happens twice in the movie, once near the beginning and once near the end, and both times packs an emotional and moral jolt with a bold, fierce visual device: Jenkins’s carefully crafted images suddenly give way to archival documentary photographs of black men subjected to abuse by the police. If Beale Street Could Talk is about true erotic love, close family bonds, searing experiences of hard words and actions; but it also has a political dimension that highlights racial injustice. My movie-going companion, a history teacher and d.j., noted a particular element in the musical score — a rumbling, reverberating distortion of subterranean bass frequencies — that emphasises characters’ psychological distress when subjected to the tyrannies of systematic oppression: for example, when Fonny’s friend Daniel intimates the torture he suffered when he himself was wrongly imprisoned, or when Tish, who works at the perfume counter in a department store, is treated like an accessory or appliance by white male customers.

The musical score, written by Nicholas Britell, packs a surprising set of pleasures besides this. I listened to it before seeing the movie, heard it while watching the movie, and listened to it again afterwards. It does the usual work of supplementing emotions that are already present onscreen, but thankfully doesn’t underscore them sentimentally, but rather enriches them while keeping them opaque. Opacity is an important virtue in the cinema of Barry Jenkins, and it marks every aspect: the score, the performances, and the photography of the images themselves, which is beautifully done by James Laxton. I’m grateful once again to have St. Félix’s description to quote: “Jenkins’s city [in contrast to Baldwin’s novel] is deliberately idealised, manicured, light-dappled. Even the ugliness that is included has been polished to a sheen.” Jenkins, blessed with the fully realised source material by Baldwin, has avoided making a realistic or naturalistic story, and instead has rendered a poetic drama, a movie as much about the emotional and psychological intimacies and contours of the characters’s experiences as it is about the course of its plot. Jenkins’s cinema shows the capability of images to convey meaning and experience far beyond the bounds of story or character, meaning that comes from deep inside oneself and that can be felt and understood intimately by the viewers who come ready to receive it.