January 31: Moonlight (2016 – Barry Jenkins)

★★★★★

Director Barry Jenkins accomplishes an unusual feat in Moonlight.  He’s created a film whose every frame highlights form and reminds us that we’re watching a movie and not a realistic presentation of life.  But at the same time, Moonlight hits us in the gut with such heart and honesty that we’re left deeply moved by the experience of watching it.  It’s a rare combination of two elements that often work at cross purposes.

From the opening sequence of the film, we’re struck by the artifice.  As the drug dealer Juan walks from his car to one of his sellers, the camera swirls quickly around him, the background almost blurring and calling attention to the camera and its movement.  This same motion continues as the seller talks with a customer.  The effect of this intrusion of artifice is not only one of striking beauty, but the gesture also signals us early that we’re watching a work of contrivance and not a documentary-style reportage.  The focus on form continues throughout.  Jenkins uses a lot of handheld camera, often with excessive motion.  In one of the film’s most effective scenes, the camera rolls with the ocean, occasionally submerging and resurfacing as Juan teaches Little how to swim.  This technique foregrounds the camera in a way that also complements the action.  A similar foregrounding occurs in the lighting.  Each of the three parts of Moonlight has its own distinct tonal palette, veering from greens and blues to browns and reds.  And the dialog here, while using a lot of the vocabulary and syntax of normal speech, also swings toward the theatrical at times.  In part two, for example, the two teenagers Kevin and Chiron sit by the ocean and talk about how a cool breeze from the sea can cause everyone in their neighborhood to pause from their hard lives for just a moment in order to experience it.  That’s a poetic thought and expression for a couple of teens smoking weed on a beach.   

Moonlight also has entire sequences that depart from a representational aesthetic.  Some of Juan’s scenes with Little work in an artful realm.  The bulked-up drug dealer holds Little and says to trust him during their swimming lesson, and he tells Little to feel the freedom that the water will give him.  This abstract vocabulary points eloquently to one of the central concerns of the film, individual autonomy.  And as Little begins to swim on his own, it feels like the boy’s taking control in the water also has a larger significance than his simply learning how to swim.  This entire stylized sequence works outside conventions of realistic storytelling.  And not only do sequences take on a poetic quality, but a network of imagery informs the film.  The color blue permeates Moonlight, for example, and water has a particular resilience in all three parts of the movie.  Such artifice is an important part of the aesthetic of the film.

Despite the distancing that could occur with so much attention to artifice, Moonlight touches the heart of viewers in a powerful way.  The film presents us with a series of dramatic scenes that resonate with an audience in a very human way.  It’s sad to see thin Little bullied at school and screamed at when home, and there’s a painful innocence when he asks Juan what a faggot is and whether the man is a drug dealer, a raw moment of self-acknowledgement for the older man.  It’s just as sad when Chiron, who has let his guard down with Kevin, experiences his friend turning on him for the approval of his peers and when we realize that Chiron sees only one way out of his situation.  Even when we meet Black, the bulked-up adult, we can see that his muscle, car and grillz are defenses, and we follow him though some very emotional conversations, first with his mother and later with Kevin, that are deeply moving despite their artifice.  The script here identifies emotional touchstone moments and presents them to us honestly that pushes the film’s self-awareness into the background.

The casting and acting add to the emotional effect.  Alex Hibbert is a thin, stooped-shouldered Little whose big eyes only occasionally turn up, and the lanky Ashton Sanders looks like an uncertain teenager susceptible to bullying.  His generally limited range of body language gives us an emotionally repressed kid, which makes the times he must be expressive all the more powerful.  Finally, Trevante Rhodes’ body tells us more about the character of Black than pages of dialog would.  His jacked build and tough accessories say this is a mean guy not to be messed with, but like his earlier mentor, Black has a deep vulnerability inside.  Locked into his intimidating body, Rhodes communicates his uncertainty and love through his eyes.  When this big actor lets a tear go, it’s deeply moving.

Barry Jenkin’s skill in Moonlight is to have rejected the realist aesthetic but simultaneously created characters whose emotions are human and genuine.  Watching this film is an exceptional experience of the power of cinematic art.

January 29: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016 – Gareth Edwards)

★★★★

When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they talked about doing some movies that were sidelines to the main Star Wars story, portraying events and characters that weren’t part of the core storyline.  They also said that these extra films would be open to more experimentation than the main Star Wars films would.

If Rogue One is an indication, this idea has promise.  The film is tightly linked to the Star Wars universe.  Its story is background to the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV, which opens with Darth Vader’s attack on Princess Leia’s ship in search of the plans for the Death Star.  Rogue One tells us how the Rebels got the plans and ends at this attack; we see the moment that Leia is handed the Death Star plans which we know she’ll soon be hiding in R2D2.  And along the way to this ending, Rogue One nods to the world of Star Wars in ways too numerous to list.  In an early example, we see that Jyn, like Luke, is raised on a technology-assisted farm, though it’s a wet planet in her case rather than a dry one.  Jyn’s mother even prepares the same blue milk that we watch Luke’s mother prepare.  Throughout Rogue One, we see characters and technology that we know from the main series.  Most conspicuously, a digital version of Peter Cushing appears as Tarkin, and a digital Carrie Fischer plays as Leia briefly, but the weapons, aircraft and settings all call back to the original series.  Some shots even look familiar, like those of the Rebel pilots in their cockpits and the sentries stationed at the Rebels’ tropical base.  For fans, all this seems wonderfully familiar yet new as we see the familiar in new settings.

Gareth Edwards also brings strong cinematic competency to Rogue One.  Although we change locations often, it’s not hard to know where we are at each point and why we’re there.  Likewise, we know who everyone is and why they’re involved in each scene despite the large cast of characters.  And the final sequence, the battle of Scarif, is a tour de force from Edwards.  The portrayal of this battle fractures into several lines, and Edwards edits them together so each one maintains its suspense independently while contributing to an effective collective suspense for the battle at large.  Edwards fuses this suspense with marvelous CGI work in the air war above the planet, too.  Rogue One works well cinematically.

The film isn’t without its flaws, though, and the shallowness of its characters undercuts a couple of its important aspects.   For one, the Rogue One aims to address the legitimacy of doing bad things for a good cause.  We see this moral dilemma highlighted in some of Cassian’s lines and actions, but Galen, Saw, Bodhi and even Jyn confront the question also.  Unfortunately, none of these characters has the depth or psychological presence to make their questioning resonate with the audience.  We don’t know their likes, dislikes, doubts or vulnerabilities s to any real degree, and we have only the most rudimentary understanding of their past.  When such underdeveloped characters try to cope with a complex moral problem like this one, it feels more like posturing than a moral struggle.  It’s laudable that Edwards tries to use the Star Wars universe to deal with such a question, but the effort is undermined by a script that doesn’t provide more psychological complexity.

There is also a bleakness to Rogue One that could have given this film more heft that most of its predecessors.  We flinch as we see main characters perish, culminating in effective freeze-frame ending.  And while we regret the loss of characters that we’d come to like, the demise of each of them would have been even more affective if they’d had more complexity.  The more we understand about cinematic characters, the more invested we are and the more we respond to them.  So although the end of Rogue One is a strong one, but would have been devastating if we’d had more connection to the characters.

Rogue One is a worthy addition to the Star Wars corpus.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a fun experience of that universe, and Edwards’ efforts to go where Star Wars hasn’t gone before inaugurates this group of films with promise.