I’m going to talk about myself for a bit.
I am a white man. I grew up in a predominantly white suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Plano. Plano is known for being affluent. My family was, by any measure around the world, well off. My mother’s mother was Mexican, but her nationality and ethnicity affected the culture of my childhood very little. I went to very good public schools for all of my life. I never got in trouble, and I always got good grades. I had to work for them, but not that much. I was made fun of a little bit in elementary school for having a stutter, but nothing traumatizing, and I always had plenty of friends.
My parents loved me and my sister well, and they worked hard to provide for us. The most uncertainty I’ve ever personally faced was when my father was laid off once. He found another job six months or so later. My sister and I traveled with my parents to a new part of the country every year. I’ve been to many of the states on family trips. We went to Disney World several times.
I knew I was going to college from a very young age. I attended the University of Oklahoma on a generous scholarship that waived out-of-state tuition, and my parents graciously paid for the rest, helping me with rent as well. I graduated relatively easily, found a job relatively easily. I have never wanted for anything. I have never experienced hardship. I have never suffered.
This isn’t a confession. Anyone who knows me knows these things about me, and most people who are close to me have heard me talk about how I know how easy my life is. I do not feel guilty about that. It’s not my fault.
Now I’m going to talk about If Beale Street Could Talk.
If Beale Street Could Talk is an uncommonly beautiful movie. The director, Barry Jenkins, made another uncommonly beautiful movie two years ago, Moonlight, and it won Best Picture at the Oscars against all odds. Moonlight is about one man, his childhood, and his self-discovery. If Beale Street Could Talk is about a couple, their journey into love, and perseverance.
Jenkins and his cinematographer, James Laxton (also: Moonlight), shot Beale Street differently from Moonlight. There are still Jenkins’s trademark close-ups that linger for what feels like too long, until you realize you’re finally seeing that person as a person and not a character. But the color palette is warmer. The sunlight plays a big role in several scenes, representing hope for a secure future in one scene when the central couple finally finds a place to live together. In another, the light finds its way into a room in streaks through the window, mimicking the bars of a prison.
This couple, played by newcomer Kiki Layne and Stephan James (John Lewis in Selma, Jesse Owens in Race), grew up in the same apartment complex in Memphis as close friends until, as young adults, they discover they love one another. Right after they find that place to live, Fonny (James) is arrested, accused of rape. Tish (Layne) knows it could not have been him; she was with him and a friend when the rape occurred. Tish also knows that she is pregnant, and she wants to keep the child. She wants them to be a family.
Much of the movie covers the efforts by Tish, her family, and Fonny’s family to prove his innocence. It flashes back to tell Tish’s and Fonny’s love story too, and the result is a movie that elevates you to the heights of passion and then pulls you back down into the muck of real life. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that this is not a hopeful movie. But it’s not hopeless either. What hope there is can be found in the characters’ inner strength, in their capacity for love that allows them to endure.
The story comes from James Baldwin’s novel of the same name, and many of his words make it into the film via voiceover or dialogue. Baldwin was an astute chronicler in essays of racism’s role in society during the civil rights era. If you like reading, I’d recommend The Fire Next Time. That’s a good starting point. If you don’t like reading, seek out the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which places his words over images, a combination that works to keep the truth unburied.
Baldwin wrote about the plight of the black American and the willful ignorance of the liberal white American. Never before have I felt more alien to the former group and more shamefully a part of the latter group. Let me explain.
Tish and Fonny are no different from me in some respects. They have families who love them and would fight for them. They are smart. They are talented. They are normal. But if you go back and reread the first three paragraphs describing my life, my words are dripping with privilege and opportunities that I have always taken for granted.
Tish and Fonny are turned away from apartment complexes because of the color of their skin. White men assume a certain unspoken ownership over Tish’s body, demonstrated in a montage of the way different kinds of people approach her at the perfume counter where she works; it’s always the white men who grab her wrist without asking, bringing it up to their nose with an uncomfortable familiarity. Fonny goes to prison, not because he’s done anything wrong, but because he was the wrong black man on the wrong corner at the wrong time.
Herein lies my problem: I am very aware that I am privileged and that opportunities were granted me that would have been rare for an African-American man, and rarer for an African-American woman. I know this, and yet as I watched If Beale Street Could Talk I was struck to my core by how I still default to thinking I am where I am because I deserve it more than someone else. And when I see numbers about how many prisoners across the country are black (or a movie about a black man going to jail…), I assume it is because they all did something (maybe not the crime they were convicted of, but something) wrong.
If Beale Street Could Talk does not let you assume this about Fonny. There is a clear alibi, and you even watch it happen. The scene of Tish and Fonny with Fonny’s old friend, Danny (Bryan Tyree Henry), is the deepest scene in the film. Fonny and Danny talk around the edges of what life was like for Danny in prison. In a brilliant, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance, Henry communicates the horror inflicted on him with furtive glances and broken language. And I walk through most of my life in complete, willful ignorance of real people just like Danny, who have to wade through shit.
The scene in which Fonny is confronted by a white cop (played by Ed Skrein) boldly portrays the cop’s racism as purely evil. He’s one of the few white characters in the movie. A landlord played by Dave Franco seems like a good dude who treats Tish and Fonny like people. Fonny’s lawyer, played by Finn Wittrock, also seems like a good dude who, as he tries to help Tish and her family free Fonny, learns the system is just as evil as that cop. Baldwin said that black people are often placed in movies “to reassure white people…that though they have made human errors, they have done nothing for which to be hated.” Let me assure you, white people, we have all done plenty for which to be hated.
Read just a little bit of James Baldwin, and you feel seen. Watch If Beale Street Could Talk, and you feel known. I don’t feel shame for my privilege or my opportunities; I feel shame that I have internally taken credit for them my whole life. Jenkins has translated Baldwin to the screen beautifully, and it’s tearing out some rotten sections of my core. In 1962, Baldwin wrote an essay for The New Yorker that included this line: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” I’m learning. I want to learn. I want to try.
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Contender?: Yes. It’s on the edge of the nominee pool, but I think it will get nominated for Best Picture above movies like Bohemian Rhapsody, First Man, and Mary Poppins Returns.
Regina King, who plays Tish’s mother, has several powerful scenes that have gotten her a lot of awards attention from the guilds, and she won the Golden Globe for Supporting Actress and gave an attention-grabbing speech. She’s in. I wish I could have included more about her in the post above, but her performance didn’t fit enough into what I wanted to write about.
The beautiful screenplay, beautiful cinematography, and beautiful score will also likely be nominated.
Unfortunately, I doubt Barry Jenkins will get a nomination.
Coulda Been a Contender 