For the week of February 27th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing the Academy Award-winning Moonlight to Blu-ray. I liked writer/director Barry Jenkins' first film, the wry relationship drama Medicine for Melancholy, but nothing in that picture prepared me for what he's done here. In telling the story of Chiron (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), a lonely African-American man struggling with his sexuality and identity over a thirty-some-year period, Jenkins achieves an emotional power that outstrips just about anything released in the last twelve months. Only Andrea Arnold's American Honey comes close, but Moonlight has a real delicacy of tone and narrative economy that make it far more accessible than Arnold' sprawling, graphic road movie. In either case, though, you get the sense of the real America, of vast emotional realities being exposed, of ambiguity and nuance winning over melodramatic uplift. Conventional wisdom would suggest that one treat Moonlight's subject matter in as baldly didactic terms as possible. Jenkins is, after all, looking into what it means to be a) male, b) black, and c) gay in this country, and if Spike Lee were at the helm, the resulting film might privilege its political agenda above all else. However, as the title suggests, Jenkins sees the world in poetic terms. He downplays moments of kitchen-sink realism (the drugs and violence on the fringes of Chiron's life; Naomie Harris' fearsome, pathetic crack addict) in favor of an ethereal, free-floating mysticism. Chiron's first sexual experience has the lyricism of a Jean Cocteau fantasy, as does the transcendent moment where his kindly mentor Juan (Mahershala Ali, who will be winning an Academy Award tonight for his work here) takes Chiron swimming and somehow exposes him to all the spiritual possibilities the world has to offer. Even the film's central creative conceit - that Chiron is played by three very different actors at three very different times in the character's life - forces the viewer to approach the film in subjective, elliptical terms. Jenkins uses the unique physicality of each actor to shorthand Chiron's psychological condition, and he turns the breaks between each of the film's three sections into an exercise in viewer engagement, where we have to infer unseen moments of great significance. The result almost has more in common with a studio installation piece even as the picture never loses its narrative rigor. I hate to resort to hyperbole, but Moonlight is somewhat of a cinematic miracle: what Jenkins and his team have done is to take a story that seems so culturally specific and personal and make it universal. This business of discovering one's own identity is always terrifying and liberating, and Moonlight heightens those qualities with rapturous abandon. One of the twenty-first century's great films.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "like anyone who has lived long enough to look back over their own story, there is intense meaning to be found in individual moments that ultimately spin a tale that, while not always easy to watch, delivers enormous emotional dividends...[The film] twists the vaunted 'three act structure' to its own ends…[and] otherwise tends to eschew some of the supposed 'necessities' of modern screenwriting. For example, who exactly is supposed to be the 'villain' in this film? It might be easy to single out Terrel [a local bully], but that's probably too facile, and in fact not entirely accurate since Chiron has already gone through trauma before Terrel enters the fray and continues to experience challenges afterward. It's almost as if Jenkins is positing the vagaries of fate and circumstance as the real 'bad guys' in the film, setting Chiron up on a quest to overcome seemingly impossible odds. It's remarkable, then, that the film's bittersweet and kinda sorta happy ending suggests that Chiron has in fact managed to at least partially quell the rage within and might even have a chance at a happier future."
Thanks to Linklater, the question, "What's the best movie trilogy ever made," has an answer: his loving, understated Before Trilogy. From the very beginning of his career, Linklater has been the most casually ambitious of all American filmmakers. Whether he's using the confines of the teen stoner comedy to ruminate on loss and teenage ennui (Dazed and Confused; last year's great Everybody Wants Some!!) or telling a simple coming-of-age story with the same actors over a twelve-year period (Boyhood), Linklater captures incredible human nuances without ever seeming to strain for effect, and his Before Trilogy is no different. In part, I suspect it's because Linklater never fully intended to make a trilogy. He kept coming back to the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) because he was interested in how they were doing, and so each film gives their relationship a self-contained, purposeful weight. 1995's Before Sunrise, for example, is a story of young love. When we first meet Jesse and Celine, they're barely out of their teens and intoxicated by the world: it's no surprise we meet them backpacking across Europe, or that their meet-cute in Vienna is instant and eleven shades of adorable. Linklater has always been the movie-poet laureate of human conversation (his dialogue is always unforced and natural, with just enough topspin on it to seem cinematic), and I don't think his gifts have ever been this sheerly pleasurable, as Jesse and Celine giddily indulge their respective verbal prowess to impress the other person. Before Sunrise is definitely the most shallow of the trilogy, but it's about kids, and kids are allowed to be shallow. Plus, Linklater adds his favorite cinematic device - a ticking countdown clock - to remind his heroes (and us) that this tete-a-tete simply cannot last. Had he stopped at Before Sunrise, we'd have a perfect, bittersweet, funny little romance about first loves.
Nine years later, though, Linklater dropped back into Jesse and Celine's lives with Before Sunset. That he was delivering a stealth sequel was a shock; that it was easily Sunrise's equal was even more impressive. This time, Jesse and Celine meet at Jesse's book-signing in Paris, but the two are a) almost a decade older and far more jaded about love and b) are still trying to untangle all the emotions still lingering after that time in Vienna. Linklater proves so adept at showing their age. On one hand, he strongly suggests that Jesse wrote his book and held the signing as a way to find Celine, but that boyish enthusiasm exists alongside the very real relationship conflicts the two have faced in the interim years. Celine is a passionate workaholic who's gently (and not unhappily) reconciled herself to singledom, while Jesse is dealing with the realities of being a slightly unsatisfied husband and father. As a result, the stakes are higher. The two can't just drop everything and be together, despite their sparkling chemistry - their outside responsibilities are simply too great. Before Sunset is the stealth masterpiece of the trilogy. It feels slight (the whole thing clocks in at well under ninety minutes), but you realize at the end that Linklater has distilled his characters' relationship into only the most aching, unbearably yearning interactions. But Linklater couldn't say goodbye to these two, and in 2013 he dropped Before Midnight, which is the full-throated, no-qualifiers-necessary masterpiece of the bunch. The beauty of this latest installment is how Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy (all of whom wrote the picture's witty, digressive script) honor the spirit of the characters they created in 1995 while pushing the series in a stark and more uncompromising new direction. Now officially a couple, Jesse and Céline are still very much in love and have made a life with one another, but they're also over forty, and with age comes regrets that weigh heavily on their union. As such, if Before Sunrise and Before Sunset functioned as frothy - if intellectually dense - romantic comedies, Before Midnight rings with the ghosts of Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. Over time, Jesse and Celine's vacation in Greece slowly devolves into a lacerating study of the challenges that can cripple a relationship. Linklater and his stars don't hit a false note. This is truthful, bracing filmmaking with an anthropological edge, and we realize that even if Linklater didn't plan a trilogy, his minute, detailed focus on age and the shifting quality of human affections has turned these three Befores into the definitive big-screen study of love and connection in the modern era. My only criticism? I don't think Linklater is going to stop at a trilogy. He loves these people too much, and I suspect we'll be checking back with them in another ten years.
Of the films in the trilogy, Svet Atanasov wrote that "Before Sunrise is Richard Linklater's best work. It is one of those rare films that is impossible to forget because its simplicity is absolutely brilliant. The other two films in The Before Trilogy are also quite moving, but the chemistry between Jesse and Celine there is not the same and as a result they have slightly different vibes…It is not difficult to like Before Sunset but there is a different type of intimacy that exists in it…Very little of the magic from the first film is retained. The cynical realist in me is ready to argue that this is exactly how life is - full of truly special moments while we are young and healthy and a little less magical when we grow older - but the entire reunion does feel a bit like a carefully choreographed play. Regardless, if you enjoyed the first film you are certainly not going to be disappointed by the sequel, and this is probably what should matter the most to you…I think that the final film in The Before Trilogy is also the most honest one. There are a lot of truths that are uttered in it about true love and aging that we all eventually discover and come to respect."
The Before Trilogy is certainly a more resonant romance than Paramount Home Media Distribution's serviceable WWII thriller Allied. Here's the thing: you can do a whole lot worse than this film. It works while you're watching it, with good work from stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard and some genuinely thrilling setpieces; director Robert Zemeckis might have spent nearly a decade in the wilderness of mo-cap adventures, but he hasn't lost any of his fastball shooting action and suspense (he stages two violent raids and an unexpected bomber crash no differently than Alfred Hitchcock would have). The problem is that the more time I spend away from the film, the less I remember - it's been neutralizing itself from my memory, and given that it's the brainchild of three Academy Award winners (Zemeckis, Pitt, and Cotillard) and one nominee (screenwriter Steven Knight), I expect a little better than "enjoyably forgettable." Plus, what I can recall seems problematic. On a structural level, the film makes little sense: the core conflict arises after an Allied spy (Pitt) learns that his wife (Cotillard) - and former French Resistance fighter - might be a German sleeper agent, but this particular drama doesn't start until almost an hour into the two-hour feature. What we get at the start is a not-unenjoyable mini-movie, of sorts, showing Pitt and Cotillard working a secret mission in North Africa, except so little of that extended prologue impacts the main plot that it ends up feeling like a frivolous digression, an action beat that maybe shouldn't have survived Knight's screenplay-outline process. You also get the sense that Zemeckis doesn't quite know how to handle anyone outside of Pitt and Cotillard. Despite the caliber of his supporting cast (Lizzy Caplan and Matthew Goode have vivid introductions and nothing more), only Jared Harris and Simon McBurney make any real impression, and I credit their skill over anything in Knight's script, which feels like one or two rewrites away from a final draft. A tighter script might have excised the nonessential characters or gotten to the central conflict faster, and it certainly would have addressed the ending: Knight and Zemeckis drop an admirably bleak finale that they immediately compromise with a coda straight out of Touched by An Angel or something. Much as Allied would like to be Casablanca, that earlier classic knew enough to leave its audience wanting a little, and Allied doesn't share that conviction.