☆☆☆☆½
What would have happened, I wonder, if this had been director Barry Jenkins' first major film, not Moonlight? If it had not arrived laden with the expectations of a hot filmmaker's new project, I imagine If Beale Street Could Talk would be an Oscar front runner. The simultaneous surprise and stinging disappointment is that it doesn't seem to be in contention.
Achingly beautiful, If Beale Street Could Talk follows one specific set of lives and their broken world, filled with injustice and unhappiness, and shows us how they find so much to love anyway. Jenkins brings a tremulous but supremely confident quality to his filmmaking, pushing his actors to create vibrant characters, particularly KiKi Layne as 19-year-old Tish and Stephan James as Fonny, once Tish's best childhood friend and now the father of her unborn child.
Tish and Fonny live in Harlem in the early 1970s. Their already-hard lives become impossibly complex when Fonny is accused of a rape he couldn't possibly have committed. Despite its soft-lighted beauty, Beale Street knows a dark reality: truth doesn't matter.
Tish and her mother (Regina King) will do anything they can think of to help Fonny; Tish's family are with her in every way, and as much as Beale Street is about race and romance, it's also about the supreme, unconditional sacrifices that strong families make for one another.
"If you've trusted love this far, don't panic now," Tish's mother implores her. "Trust it all the way." Exquisite words in an exquisite movie.
Viewed January 20, 2019 -- AMC Sunset 5
1115
Achingly beautiful, If Beale Street Could Talk follows one specific set of lives and their broken world, filled with injustice and unhappiness, and shows us how they find so much to love anyway. Jenkins brings a tremulous but supremely confident quality to his filmmaking, pushing his actors to create vibrant characters, particularly KiKi Layne as 19-year-old Tish and Stephan James as Fonny, once Tish's best childhood friend and now the father of her unborn child.
Tish and Fonny live in Harlem in the early 1970s. Their already-hard lives become impossibly complex when Fonny is accused of a rape he couldn't possibly have committed. Despite its soft-lighted beauty, Beale Street knows a dark reality: truth doesn't matter.
Tish and her mother (Regina King) will do anything they can think of to help Fonny; Tish's family are with her in every way, and as much as Beale Street is about race and romance, it's also about the supreme, unconditional sacrifices that strong families make for one another.
"If you've trusted love this far, don't panic now," Tish's mother implores her. "Trust it all the way." Exquisite words in an exquisite movie.
Viewed January 20, 2019 -- AMC Sunset 5
1115
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