“If Beale Street Could Talk,” director Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to “Moonlight,” is a rich panorama of black life in the 1970s New York. While the plot centers on a life-shattering injustice and other forms of prejudice are always lurking around the corner, those moments are unable to destroy the passionate and enduring love between childhood sweethearts Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James). Their relationship is the bedrock of the film, yet “Beale Street” can’t really be called a conventional love story; a love story shows the coming together of a couple, but Tish and Fonny enjoy an enraptured, unquestioned connection from the very first shot of the film, a connection forged as children before they had the words to express it. If it’s not a love story, per se, perhaps it can be called a love survival story, because Jenkins not only gives an empathetic and stirring evocation of young love, he also gives an astute summary of the many pernicious obstacles conspiring to destroy a young black couple of the time, many of which are unfortunately still with us. In this project, Jenkins is drawing liberally from James Baldwin, not just as the author of the source novel, but on many of the ideas that Baldwin spoke out on his entire life.
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James Baldwin was, and in some ways still is, our most perceptive and compassionate observer of the effect on individual souls of the ills of systemic racism. The possibly confusing title (isn’t Beale Street in New Orleans?) is highly instructive when explained, indicating the multiplicity of stories taking place in black neighborhoods across America, but also stating as fact that those voices are silenced. One of the greatest strengths of “If Beale Street Could Talk” is showing the mechanisms of that silencing, the personal costs that black communities suffer from problems that can often seem abstract to people who don’t experience it themselves.
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One of the more banal but also wide-ranging and consequential problems that young black people like Tish and Fonny experience is housing discrimination. Trying to find a place of their own where they can start a life together, Fonny fumes at the unspoken but loudly heard prejudice of landlords unwilling to rent to a black couple. Even though it was illegal at the time, large scale landlords like our current president were able to flout the law with little consequence because of the difficulty of proving racial bias as the reason applicants were denied, as Fonny and Tish learn when they repeatedly lose apartments to white families and only hear innocuous excuses. It isn’t until they meet a sympathetic younger landlord (Dave Franco) that they’re able to find a place, and even then they have to settle for an unfurnished and empty loft space.
The most immediate and terrible obstacle to Fonny and Tish’s love is Fonny’s incarceration for a crime he didn’t commit. While the film portrays Fonny’s arrest as the result of a grudge from a racist cop that Fonny offended, the film also understands that, as seen in stirring period photographs, Fonny is one of literally millions of young black men who have had their lives forever altered by the dehumanizing experience of prison, a problem which has only accelerated since that time. While the scenes of Fonny in prison are heartbreaking, showing him missing the growth of his child and the presence of his wife, the most haunting scene dealing with prison doesn’t actually take place there; the scene where Fonny sees his old friend Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry) who has just gotten out. A description of this brilliantly shot and acted scene can’t do it justice, but suffice to say that Jenkins uses a slowly enveloping darkness as Daniel and Fonny’s conversation turns from the pleasure of seeing an old friend to a statement of horror as Daniel tells, or rather cannot bring himself to tell, the lasting psychological damage he’s received from his time in prison, that we as viewers know Fonny is soon destined for.
While Jenkins uses a quiet scene to showcase the problem of over-incarceration, he uses a loud, explosive scene to showcase a more hidden problem, the insidious internal effects of racism. Baldwin wrote and spoke eloquently about how the mental gymnastics needed to justify an ideology of hate and superiority can seep into seemingly unrelated areas of thought, warp self-images and prevent loving relationships in people of all races, as seen when Tish informs Fonny’s family that she is carrying his child.
The two families live in the same building and are materially very similar, but the confrontation rips the mask off two entirely different ways of seeing the world, and the place of black people within it. Soon after hearing the news, Mrs. Hunt (Aunjanue Ellis) calls the Rivers ‘n-words,’ openly calling them inferior and aligning her with racist whites looking down on this family of black neighbors similar to her own. Later Mrs. Hunt somehow digs deeper for an even nastier insult and wishes that Tish’s child, her grandchild, would shrivel up and die in the womb. These insults betray a damaged psychology too complex to fully excavate here, but in short Mrs. Hunt is viewing her life through the dictates of the ruling class. Whether those are expressed through religious instructions or prescriptions for socially proper behavior, underpinning it all is the assumption that blacks are inferior to whites, the assumption that Mrs. Hunt carries to the hurtful conclusion that she is superior to her long-time friends and the mother of her grandchild. While Mrs. Hunt’s words may not carry the same consequence as the actions of a racist cop, to hear such words from your supposed family in some ways cuts even deeper.
These poisonous words, along with the film’s explorations of housing discrimination and over-incarceration, show Jenkin’s hard-headed portrayal of the many obstacles facing a young, black couple like Tish and Fonny, yet the beauty of “If Beale Street Could Talk” is that their love endures in spite of it all.
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