If you look carefully, you can see “Moonlight” gleam. It’s a meek, but powerful story of a young gay black man in Miami struggling to give and to feel love. It contains deep wells of personality, empathy and intimacy, but visually and tonally, Barry Jenkins’s film is equally beautiful, a sensuous and ravishing look at romance and identity that envelops you in a hypnotic, soothing lunar glow.
We meet Chiron (pronounced Shy-RONE) at three stages of his life, first as a young boy, then as a teenager in high school, and finally as a 20-something adult (Ashton Sanders). As a kid (Alex Hibbert) he’s racing through a field, the camera dashing to keep up and careening from side to side as it glimpses a few other boys chasing him. It’s not a moment of frivolous fun, but something more violent and saddening. They’re trying to pelt him with rocks, and Chiron takes refuge in a burned out motel room. In it he finds a charred vial, a remnant of a junkie’s former squalor. His savior is a drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali). He nicknames Chiron “Little” and despite the boy’s timid, apprehension, offers him a meal and a place to stay for the night, only to then bring him home to his drug-addled single mom. Juan emerges as a father figure in Chiron’s life, but the boy is caught up in a circle of dependency between his addicted mom and the dealer who keeps selling to her regardless.
In one of the film’s several achingly heartfelt moments, Juan takes Little into the ocean to learn how to swim. The camera bobs alongside as Juan carefully suspends him in the water to float, and the moment evokes a spiritual baptism. “At some point you got to decide who you want to be,” Juan says. “Don’t let no one decide that for you.” Continue reading “Moonlight”