BEFORE: Well, this was originally the slot I'd saved for "The Equalizer 2", which might have fit in thematically after "Triple Frontier", but who knows. I've delayed "The Equalizer 2" until next year, so that I can fit in another Melissa McCarthy film, "The Happytime Murders", later this month. I was slightly over capacity for the year, which is a relatively nice problem to have - I'd rather have three too many than fall short by three at the end. So, something had to go - with three films in a row that had the same actor in them, it's easy to just jettison the middle one. Since I'd already had a focus on puppetry earlier this year ("Being Elmo", "I Am Big Bird") I think if I look at the big picture, maybe "The Happytime Murders" should be part of this year and not next year. But there's also the possibility that movie sucks, I'll never know until I watch it. Now I don't have to think about the line-up until late October, when I'll have to drop one more, and then a final drop in November should bring me in right on the nose, 300 films watched for the year.
But I have to GET there first - Pedro Pascal carries over today from "Triple Frontier". And I just found out he's got the lead role in "The Mandalorian", the new "Star Wars" TV show that will be on Disney Plus in November. So I'll be seeing him again, one way or the other.
THE PLOT: A young woman embraces her pregnancy while she and her family set out to prove her boyfriend and lover innocent of a crime he didn't commit.
AFTER: This was Barry Jenkins' follow-up to "Moonlight", which won the Best Picture Oscar - and it took me so long to get around to "Moonlight", that I ended up watching his follow-up in the same year! OK, that one's on me, but to be fair, it took me a while to accumulate enough films with Mahershala Ali in them to make it possible to link to "Moonlight". Hey, if I live by this system, I die by this system - I'm not saying my method is perfect, but at least it's unique and all mine. "Moonlight" was something of a surprise sleeper hit, and I guess I see the temptation there to repeat what worked the last time, do that again in the hopes of getting the same result, or at least something similar.
My review of "Moonlight" deemed it quite boring - my pick for Best Picture would have been "Arrival", if I had seen all the films before the deadline and if I were a voting member of the Academy, which I am not. "If Beale Street" is also pretty boring, but at least it didn't put me to sleep, like "Moonlight" did. "Moonlight" took a stage-play with a split narrative (all three actors playing the same character, at different ages, appeared on the stage at the same time) and turned it back into a linear production, with things in the proper chronological order - the first act came first, the second act came second - and that was at least easy to follow as we watched the character grow up.
This film appears to do the opposite, taking the novel by James Baldwin (in which, I assume, all the scenes play out chronologically, but I'll admit, I don't know for sure. It could be riddled with flashbacks, who knows?) and turning that linear story, as is the current fashion, into a time-jumping collage of sorts. The film toggles between the present timeline (this starts when Fonny is in jail, and his girlfriend has to tell her family, and his, that she's pregnant with his baby) and the past, where we see Fonny and Tish fall in love, get an apartment together, and slowly, slowly we learn about the events that happened leading up to his arrest. I'm not a fan of this trendy way of starting a story in the middle, and then doling out the narrative breadcrumbs, leaving it up to the audience to try and put the whole loaf back together. If it's not done to be trendy, then it's usually done to cover up or skip over some very slow parts of the narrative, and to me neither excuse is acceptable.
Or perhaps it's the too-easy temptation to lead off the film with the most dramatic moment - here it's a woman telling her incarcerated boyfriend that she's pregnant - in what's known as the "splash-page effect". Comic books are noted for sometimes starting in the middle of the battle scene with a large one-paneled first page, designed to hit readers hard first and draw them into the rest of the book, and don't worry if you feel like you missed a bit, because the story will snap back as soon as the hero has a chance to reflect on how he got into this conflict. It does work if it's done right, but in the case of a film like "If Beale Street Could Talk", the director had no way to maintain that dramatic tension, the rest of the scenes, past and future, aren't nearly as exciting as that, so they all may seem rather tepid by comparison.
But this all is from my perspective, and I'm hardly an expert on the African-American experience of living in Harlem in the 1970's. As always, your mileage may vary - I did watch the documentary "13th" earlier this year, and this film managed to expand on some of those racially-charged theories, like racist cops arresting people just for being black, or convincing witness to pick the wrong man out of a line-up just to settle their case, then having so many black men incarcerated that giving them all the fair trials they're entitled to would bog down the whole legal system, so often the accused men are urged to take a plea deal, essentially serving time for crimes they didn't commit just to have a chance of getting released in a shorter time-frame.
There's still so much I don't understand here - like the title, why the reference to a street in New Orleans, when the story is set in Harlem? There was an opening excerpt from James Baldwin that attempted to explain this, something about how the history of Beale Street is the history of all blacks in America, but I didn't quite understand that either. There's only so much I can understand when I'm not part of this world, and I haven't had the same life experiences or backgrounds - I felt the same way about "Crazy Rich Asians", some things of course will always be universal, but then there are other things that just aren't. Still, I'm left scratching my head after this one, wondering what all the damn fuss was about.
NITPICK POINT: How is "Fonny" an appropriate nickname for someone whose given name is "Alonzo"? Shouldn't it be "Lonny" and not "Fonny"? I could see "Fonny" as a nickname for someone whose name is ALFONZO, but now ALONZO. Did the author give the character the wrong first name, was it a typo or does he not understand how nicknames work?
Also starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James (last seen in "Race") Regina King (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Aunjanue Ellis (ditto), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Widows"), Ed Skrein (last seen in "Deadpool"), Emily Rios, Michael Beach (last seen in "Aquaman"), Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Finn Wittrock (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Diego Luna (last seen in "Flatliners"), Dave Franco (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Milanni Mines, Ethan Barrett, Kaden Byrd.
RATING: 4 out of 10 graffiti-covered subway cars
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