On a basic level, all movies serve the same purpose: to answer questions. Maybe they answer one question, maybe several, but no matter the number, an inquisitive engine drives every cinematic enterprise. Roger Ebert famously described the movies as “a machine that generates empathy” — we go to movies to learn, period.
One of film’s most effective tricks is its ability to show us the world through the eyes of someone else. It’s become a cliché by now, but the phrase “the personal is political” sums up this phenomenon perfectly. A good narrative utilizes its subjectivity to boil down large-scale social issues and show us the individuals living inside them.
Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” is one such film. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” it tells the story of Chiron, a young black man growing up in Miami during the 1980s.
Clocking in under two hours, “Moonlight” manages to be about everything at once without ever sacrificing its specificity. It is an absolute triumph: deeply felt, technically dazzling and illuminating without being self-congratulatory. Perhaps its greatest accomplishment is its ability to focus on the knotty entanglements of sexuality and race without ever reducing itself to a didactic “issues” film.
“Moonlight” is told in three parts, picking up on Chiron’s life as an elementary schooler (Alex Hibbert), a tortured teenager (Ashton Sanders) and a drug-dealing adult (Trevante Rhodes). Though Chiron is a taciturn, deeply introverted character, each actor unlocks the dialogue he’s having with himself and displays an extraordinary sense for wordless communication.
The crux of the plot revolves around Chiron’s relationship to his mother (Naomie Harris) as she slips into addiction, the drug dealer supplying her, Juan (Mahershala Ali) who literally teaches Chiron to swim and a classmate (Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome and André Holland) with whom he develops a sexual relationship.
Each of these threads lead directly back to Chiron’s questions about his own identity — his masculinity, sexuality and his role as a son. The more kaleidoscopic the film’s reach, the more tightly focused it becomes on Chiron.
Though it is acutely aware of time and temporality, Jenkins’ film is much more concerned with maintaining tone than a forward-moving plot structure. While we follow Chiron’s chronological development, there are several moments where one chapter doubles back on a previous one. A particular fight between Chiron and his mother recurs in moments of distress. The film’s gorgeous final shot returns to an image from its first chapter. At every turn, Jenkins keeps the past in mind as Chiron tackles the present.
That present is loaded. It’s no coincidence that “Moonlight” is set at the height of the Reagan-era war on drugs: a large part of the film’s power lies in its pragmatic but muted acknowledgement of its political climate.
Juan, a quasi-father figure for Chiron, sells crack. As he and Chiron grow closer, neither one loses sight of the fact that Chiron’s mom is buying the product that affords Juan his lifestyle. There’s no overt thematic showboating here, but it’s easy to see what Jenkins is saying: moral lucidity is more often an ideal than a reality. The bad things we do affect others just as heavily as the good ones.
“Moonlight” doesn’t only pull power from its political setting — the film’s mastery of music and camera movement give it a depth of feeling so immense that it’s often overwhelming.
Though there are few actual POV shots, but cinematographer James Laxton shows us the world as Chiron experiences it. A wrestling match in childhood focuses on the sensory details of another man’s touch. Dollies quietly pan across spaces that overwhelm him. Dream sequences that focus on sex and water have difficult-to-describe tactile qualities.
The soundscapes are vast and exhilarating. Classical music bumps against hip-hop, objective natural sound gives way to extremely subjective moments, with ambient noise standing in for mental discord. The harmony with which Jenkins weaves together what we see and what we hear is always surprising, always affecting and never distracting.
Perhaps the best thing about “Moonlight” is that its achievements cannot be singled out. It is impossible to discuss one of the film’s strengths without incorporating four or five others. In that sense, “Moonlight” is fully formed in ways that few films ever are.
The performances — especially from Piner, Harris and R&B singer Janelle Monáe as Juan’s girlfriend — astonish, but they’re supported by a marvelous script, cutting-edge camerawork, pitch-perfect sound design; the list goes on.
It’s rare for a film that screams humanism or universality to actually achieve either of those goals. “Boyhood” did it. “Moonlight” is a very different film, but in a way, it’s an even more effective one — by taking a laundry list of hot-button issues, putting them in a blender, and refusing to let any single one overwhelm the rest, we get a fuller portrait of humanity than we likely expected.
If movies answer questions, “Moonlight” asks us what it’s like to be a person, and its answer, astonishingly, feels entirely new.
