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MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

I’m not sure if the United States will ever get over racism. It’s been 150 years since the end of The Civil War and a half century since the Civil Rights Act and our culture still finds a way to treat people of color as second-class citizens, creating new ways to denigrate and disenfranchise Black Americans.

Popular culture has been outspoken in recent years, with films such as Get Out, BlacKkKlansman, and The Hate U Give using the horror, satire and YA genres to drive their message home. Many films and TV shows set in a dystopian future (including The Walking Dead and The Handmaid’s Tale)comment on prejudice and racism as a subtext of the human condition.

If Beale Street Could Talk, which takes place in early 1970s Harlem, approaches this topic as literature. The title of the film is explained in an introductory quote from Baldwin’s book: “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.”

Tish (Layne) is 19 and Fonny (James) is 22 and they are deeply in love. However, there are a couple of big problems: Fonny is incarcerated and accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman. They are unmarried and Tish is expecting a baby. Either of these moral dilemmas could have been used to create a sensational movie. But writer-director Barry Jenkins (adapting a 1974 novel by James Baldwin) has created a work of art that is so tender in its simple love story while still conveying the anguish and injustice that threatens to tear apart two young people.

We learn about them through a series of flashbacks Their relationship begins sweetly and Fonny treats Tish (who is a virgin) with respect and care. However, as their love becomes more physical, Tish discovers that she is pregnant. Although this news is hard for the two families to accept at first (shown in an early extended scene that is awkward and funny, but also filled with religious indignation as well as colorful profanity), Tish’s mother Sharon (Regina King) is the first to celebrate this event. The families will now have a grandchild and they must learn to create a place of love for this new creation.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a surprisingly quiet and moving film telling a story of young love with the omnipresent specter of class and race as the undertone. It's a delicate thing to create a mood of quiet, painful outrage, but Jenkins and Baldwin pull it off. Regina King deserves all of the praise she is getting for her central role as the matriarch willing to move heaven and earth for her daughter and her incarcerated lover. The film is filled with great performances, beautiful cinematography and a lush musical score.

But the Beale Street legacy is bittersweet. There is hope for Tish and Fonny by the film’s conclusion, but it is a hope diminished by a world unwilling to offer them the very best. We need the compassion of Barry Jenkins (who also made 2016’s beautifully painful Moonlight) to help show us the way to a better world.

Halo and Pitchfork Rating:

Four halos: Love story as social commentary.
Three pitchforks: A few occasions of extremely strong language; scenes of lovemaking, tastefully filmed; an undercurrent of racism; liberal alcohol consumption.

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