Pride Month 2020: Moonlight (6/11/2020)

For the next few weeks, I'm going to be every few days reviewing a prominent LGBT film that's come out in the past decade or so. I've decided to start with Moonlight for a couple of reasons; for one thing, it's simply one of the best LGBT films out there, and for another, it is extremely relevant to what pride month is in our current year.

To say that Moonlight is strictly an LGBTQ+ film is, however, misleading. It's a story about a gay man in contemporary America, yes, and is indeed overwhelmingly queer in its message, but to try and declare it as any one singular thing is reductive at best. Moonlight is a dense, beautiful film that contains layers and layers of subtextual thematic exploration in basically every scene. Pick any event, any conversation, any shot in the film, and you could write a short essay on the meaning of that one example alone.

Moonlight is, on a surface level, a story about a Black gay man in southern United States trying to find his place and his identity in the world. It is as simple of a story as it sounds on its surface level, but it is incredibly rich with emotion and depth, and every shot and performance adds to the rich tapestry of life that we see before us. Director Barry Jenkins does an almost superhumanly good job of weaving this together, producing a work that would stack up against the finest even the most celebrated directors of all time have to offer.

I have heard complaints from others that Moonlight is too reserved of a film, that its actors and direction doesn't allow its characters to properly emote. I disagree strongly with this criticism. Not only does it play into the masculine stoicism that is often encouraged in society - and critiqued in Moonlight - but it also allows Jenkins and his cast to more accurately convey how people in the real world interact. People generally don't emote through exaggerated emotional monologues; in fact, a shockingly low amount of human interaction actually occurs through verbal means. Instead of showing us how we should be feeling, Moonlight shows us an example of real people interacting with each other, and invites us inside. And the more the audience is able to submerge itself into this inner world of the film and its characters, the less we see them as images on a screen, and the more we see them as fellow people to feel true empathy for.

This is all centered around one of the most compelling, complex protagonists in recent cinematic history - perhaps ever. That may not be readily apparent - for much of the film, Chiron is quiet, reserved, and almost comes off like a blank slate, particularly in the opening act. A lesser cast or director wouldn't have been able to sell him, but the three actors (most notably Mahershala Ali) who play him betray a depth of unexpressed emotion that constantly feels as if it is about to explode outwards, but never gets an outlet. Chiron is like anybody else you could possible imagine in American society; a man who wants nothing more than to be loved, to be understood, to be seen, but is nonetheless pushed down by society at every angle, until he feels he has no other choice than to conform to the role that is expected of him - but even then, he's still just the lost little boy that we see at the beginning of the film, fleeing from the world and desperately in need of a helping hand.

Through the lens of the gay Black experience, Moonlight has something to say about everything that could possibly come into contact with, from the plight of Black Americans in the suburbs of major cities, surrounded by violence and crime as a result of their historical poverty caused by supression, to the intersection of toxic masculinity and homosexuality, and how the pressure to conform to an expected image of a Black Man is nothing but harmful. In a world where masculinity is a strict, rigid code of stoicism, violence and shallow, objectifying heterosexuality, when all the role models a boy growing up in the poor suburbs of Miami has are drug dealers and criminals, where does this leave the concept of individual identity? At what point can you choose for yourself who you are, and what are the consequences of that actions? And how can one possibly find love when they are not even allowed to be vulnerable and be true to themself?

It's fitting that, being a movie critiquing the societal boxes built around racial, masculine and homosexual identity, Moonlight too resists the urge to fit into a conventional story structure. Told in the form of three vignettes showing Chiron as a little boy who grows into an adolescent, an adolescent who becomes a man, and a man who seems to have found his place, but still never really feels like he belongs. It's too interconnected to be an anthology, but too segmented to feel like other feature films. A lesser film would have told this story through flashbacks, as modern day Chiron seeks to escape the life of crime he's found himself in, or enters a romantic drama subplot, but Moonlight is none of these things, and better and more original for it. The future is still full of possibility, and any of these things could happen, but what's more important is the story of how he got to that point in the first place.

In this way, Moonlight truly is a strongly queer text, not just in the sense that it is about homosexuality, but in the way that it takes these social constructs surrounding the way our identity develops and critiques them, and analyzes how individuals are drawn to conform to these rigid structures and what happens to those who might not fit them. Even then, it can also be read heavily through a variety of other angles. Moonlight is so good because it is so much conveyed with so little. Even the more surface level aspects reflect this; everything from a verbal confrontation to a simple glance of longing carries the thematic and emotional weight of a freight train.

Moonlight is, for me, a truly perfect film. It's the kind of movie that only comes a few times in a lifetime, a film that's such an outstanding example of everything that cinema can do and everywhere it seems to be going that it almost seems impossible. But it is possible, because we have Moonlight; a film I could keep talking about for hours without feeling like I'm doing it justice; a film where nearly every scene stands amongst some of the most memorable of the last decade. It's a profoundly important commentary and an emotional tour-de-force to boot. Moonlight is an incredible film, and anyone who has any interest in cinema should see it.