Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.5

If Beale Street Could Talk Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 27, 2019

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously pronounced, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” though on a microscopic level you’d be hard pressed to prove it by the rampant immoralities and injustices depicted in If Beale Street Could Talk. This riveting follow-up to (eventual) Best Picture winner Moonlight by writer and director Barry Jenkins has a redolent literary imprimatur, having been culled from a novel by the redoubtable James Baldwin, but in its own way this film addresses at least some of the same issues as Moonlight did, albeit admittedly in sometimes radically different ways. The film begins with an epigraph by Baldwin which seeks to help elucidate the symbology of Beale Street:

Beale Street is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong and the jazz were born.

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. This novel deals with the possibility and the impossibility, the absolute necessity, to give expression to this legacy.

Beale Street is a loud street. It is left to the reader to discern a meaning in the beating of the drums.

If Beale Street Could Talk is told in a deliberately disjunctive, nonlinear fashion, one which probably reveals the roiling emotional state of focal character Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) as well as anything. Tish also narrates in a conceit that allows the film to segue with surprising facility despite its proclivity for ping ponging between timeframes and vignettes at various junctures. Tish has grown up with Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), and the childhood friendship blossoms into intimate romance as they get older. Tish and Fonny seem to be, in that oft used phrase, made for each other, but fate intervenes when Fonny is unjustly accused of rape and is incarcerated. Meanwhile, Tish finds out she’s pregnant with Fonny’s child. It’s the stuff of lurid melodrama or soap opera, frankly, but If Beale Street Could Talk packs an emotional wallop unlike anything I’ve personally encountered for quite a while.

First of all, while that above paragraph documents the underlying plot points of If Beale Street Could Talk in "order", so to speak, it's interesting to note that Jenkins reveals that Fonny is in jail almost from the get go, in just the first of several gut punches that instantly and unavoidably lend a bittersweet quality to scenes of an earlier, ostensibly happier, time (which, because of the structure of the film, take place after the revelation of Fonny's status as a prisoner). What's so remarkable about If Beale Street Could Talk is not necessarily how effortlessly it documents all sorts of undeniably sad aspects of African American life in Harlem of the 1970s (as remarkable as that aspect is), but how there's a very resilient glimmer of hope shining through even the morass of injustice, apathy and downright cruelty.

Part of what gives If Beale Street Could Talk its almost unbelievable uplifting quality (i.e., given some of the events portrayed in the film), is the beautifully strong portrayal of a unified family supporting Tish. Regina King has gone into this current year's award festivities record books with Academy Award and Golden Globe wins for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Tish's rock solid mother Sharon, and one of the film's most emotionally devastating scenes is a late moment when Sharon is able to track down the haggard woman who accused Fonny of rape. But the rest of Tish's family, while perhaps not given the focus that Sharon is, also helps to provide the film with a real feeling of a family that "circles the wagons", so to speak, when trouble comes knocking. Colman Domingo as Joseph, Tish's father, and Teyonnah Paris as Ernestine, Tish's sister, also have great moments (there's a fantastic scene with Fonny's family where Tish announces her pregnancy and things go from bad to worse in a big hurry).

If King garnered most of the attention on the awards circuit, it’s probably unavoidable that If Beale Street Could Talk rises or falls on the work of KiKi Layne and Stephan James, and here the film could not possibly be better served than it is with these two really memorable performances. Both of these still young actors (this is Layne’s first feature film) deliver the goods in ways both large and small, and it’s easy to both believe that Tish and Fonny were in fact “made for each other”, as well as that both characters have the intestinal fortitude to ford the rather overwhelming vagaries of fate that are delivered to their emotional doorsteps.

Had Jenkins not been able to so remarkably infuse If Beale Street Could Talk with a feeling that at least some elements of the universe are moral, the film could have wallowed in a feeling of abject hopelessness, which may in turn have made some elements like a nasty white policeman out to get Fonny come off as more screed like than they actually do. This is a film that, much like Fonny and Tish themselves, has a certain patience in depicting the slow, almost imperceptible, bend toward justice. But this is a film that takes Baldwin’s epigraph at its opening to heart — in its own way, If Beale Street Could Talk isn’t speaking as much as it’s beating a drum to draw attention to one especially sad side of the legacy Baldwin mentions.

If Beale Street Could Talk Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

If Beale Street Could Talk is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. The IMDb lists the Arri Alexa 65 as having digitally captured the imagery at a source resolution of 6.5K, which was then finished at a 4K DI. As can be seen from some of the screenshots accompanying this review, the look has been tweaked toward a more "traditional" filmic quality, and there's a really beautiful, and surprisingly organically rendered, texture to this presentation that really helps it to achieve significant depth a lot of the time. Some interstitial moments have been "degraded" somewhat so that they almost resemble 16mm (see screenshot 15 for one example). The palette is just gorgeously robust throughout this film, but it's interesting to note how Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton tend to choose little pops of color in otherwise rather drab surroundings, in a visual gambit that kind of reminded me of a line in the song about another Harlem, "there is a rose in Spanish Harlem". Textures on things like Tish's green corduroy coat or some of Fonny's sculpting are precise looking and virtually palpable at times. The one stylistic choice here that frankly didn't quite work for me were the interstitial black and white photographs. They're often evocative as all get out, and just as often rather disturbing, but they tended to interrupt the story for me rather than support it or comment on it. That said, contrast and detail levels are excellent throughout all of the black and white stills.

If Beale Street Could Talk Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

If Beale Street Could Talk features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that delivers some of its most immersive moments courtesy of a really fine score by Nicholas Britell, as well as a variety of source cues that are utilized (the use of Billy Preston's gospel tinged "My Country Tis of Thee" to accompany the closing credits will probably be an extremely emotional experience for some). The film's use of densely populated frames where a number of characters are interacting also helps to offer good surround activity, as do several outdoor scenes in urban environments. The cloistered confines of the "glass wall" area where Tish and Fonny interact has some distinctive sonics as well which are recreated in a very realistic manner. Dialogue is always rendered cleanly and clearly on this problem free track.

If Beale Street Could Talk Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director Barry Jenkins


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 22:17) also offer an optional commentary track by director Barry Jenkins.


• If Beale Street Could Talk: Poetry in Motion (1080p; 27:35) is an above average featurette covering a number of subjects that are both tied particularly to this film as well as more "meta" aspects, and offers a number of really well done, and in some cases rather funny, interviews.


• Gallery (1080p; 1:05) features either an Auto Advance or a Manual Advance mode. The timing is for the Auto Advance option.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:04)

If Beale Street Could Talk Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's no getting around the fact that If Beale Street Could Talk is not a particularly "easy" watch, and in fact it's emotionally devastating on any number of levels. The fact that the film actually leaves a wake of hopefulness in the detritus of so much tragedy is one of its most commendable aspects. Technical merits are first rate, and If Beale Street Could Talk comes Highly recommended.