Mark Reviews Movies: IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 13, 2018

Writer/director Barry Jenkins has crafted a film of deep, abiding love. If Beale Street Could Talk is a story of love between a young couple, torn apart by a corrupt criminal justice system but staying together because they can see no other option. It's also about familial love—the ways in which the families of these two will do anything to give their kin a chance at a life together.

There are no villains in this story, but there are people who refuse to love or let love move as it will. They're driven by a strong but misguided religious beliefs, a pain that is all-consuming in its need for justice or vengeance, a prejudice against anyone whose skin color is different from his own, or, perhaps, one or two other motivations for the few characters here who have lost or never attained a sense of that uniting force among humanity.

There are moments of great outrage and strife here. In flashbacks, we watch how romance and more develop between Tish (KiKi Layne) and Alonzo (Stephan James), called "Fonny" by his friends and family. After knowing each other since childhood and realizing that there's more to their relationship, they're happy—forming a solid bond, looking to make a home, thinking of starting a family of their own. They overcome much in the process, from their low income to being denied a chance to rent a place—simply because the landlords in the city are mostly white and don't like the idea of having a black couple living at their properties.

In the present, Alonzo is in jail, awaiting trial for a crime that he professes he didn't commit—and which no one who knows him believes he would be capable of committing. Tish is pregnant and desperate to get this man—devoted to her and, immediately upon hearing the news that she's expecting, to their forthcoming child—out of the system.

Despite the circumstances and the various forces that would keep these two apart, this is a story about love. It rarely shows itself in grand gestures, although there is a liberating scene of Tish and Alonzo cheering in the street after finding a place to call home. It mostly shows itself in little ways that would be imperceptible to most of the world.

Before having sex for the first time, Tish undresses in Alonzo's apartment, and he covers her naked body with a blanket, lest she feel uncomfortable or get too cold. The fathers of the young people return to their old ways of hustling, just to make enough money to pay for mounting costs of Alonzo's court troubles. Tish's father Joseph (Colman Domingo) doesn't tell his daughter what he's doing, and that, in its own way, is an act of love, too. The love is obvious when Tish's mother Sharon (Regina King) travels some distance to save the father of her grandchild.

When Alonzo happens to meet an old friend named Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry, in a brief but impactful appearance), he invites the friend to his apartment. Providing him with beer and cigarettes, Alonzo listens—genuinely listens—to his friend's story of spending time in prison on a trumped-up charge.

Then there's the landlord (played by Dave Franco) who agrees to lease a place to the couple, after they have spent a long time looking and being rejected. He's white and Jewish, but he doesn't care about the color of their skin. He loves to give people in love a chance. It's because his own mother loved him enough to teach him that way of thinking. "Sometimes," he says, "that's all that makes the difference between us and them."

The little acts of compassion and caring make all the difference here, because at this time—the early 1970s—and in this place—New York City and especially Harlem—the bigger picture is set against these characters. Alonzo very well might be going to prison for raping a woman he has never met. Tish may have to raise their child on her own. The victim of the crime, an abandoned woman from Puerto Rico named Victoria (Emily Rios), will never have actual justice and, likely, will have to remain in hiding, if only so the prosecution of another black man can continue without interruption. The story here may be focused on Tish and Alonzo, but its scope is wide enough to include Victoria's side of things, too.

That's the degree of love that's on display from a filmmaking level here. Jenkins' approach is tender, compassionate, and all-encompassing. We can see his admiration for his actors in the way they are often captured in close-ups, sometimes looking directly at the camera, so that we can intimately see and feel what's happening in their minds. With cinematographer James Laxton, Jenkins gives us a romantic, lush depiction of the era. Through the melodic and occasionally jazz-infused score of Nicholas Britell, we get that romanticism, but in the quivering strings of a cello, we also sense the constant apprehension of these characters—from the simple anxiety of going to bed with a lover for the first time to a fateful encounter with a racist cop (played by Ed Skrein), who apparently doesn't forget an affront to his power.

The most obvious love, though, is how Jenkins' screenplay has translated James Baldwin's novel for the screen. The plot remains but is secondary to the ways that the author always made room for the political in the personal, while never sacrificing people for the politics.

They're intertwined—the personal and the political—in inseparable ways here. The story of Alonso's constantly delayed trial is a still-relevant indictment of a criminal justice system that plays with evidence, witnesses, and court dates in an effort to coerce people to take plea deals. Aside from that, there are other, smaller moments that reveal much. When Tish takes a job at a perfume counter at a local department store, the way in which a white man tries to possesses her, if only for a brief but interminable moment, while smelling a fragrance is chilling.

If Beale Street Could Talk has a lot to say about these characters and the politics driving their story. Jenkins lends these matters a feeling of poetry in the filmmaking, the dialogue, and Tish's honest narration. It's a poem of injustice and fear and pain, yes, but it's also one of love.

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