With his new film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, Barry Jenkins achieves something rare: he pulls the background into the foreground, combines a drama with an essay-film, an analytical documentary. What’s more, he does so without at all weakening or diminishing the drama; rather, the movie’s investigative elements intensify its emotional power, by reflecting them through its characters’ voices and consciousness.
It’s a historical drama, one that’s set around the time of the novel’s composition, but it’s equally a story about today, a movie that relies on its historical context to bring to the fore not the incidental differences but the disturbing similarities connecting those supposedly bygone days to the moment at hand. The movie is current, infuriatingly current, in its clear and direct exposure of the system of white supremacy that’s enshrined and perpetuated in the workings of law—from the laws themselves to their street-level abuse by police officers, their backroom abuse by police officials, the chicanery of prosecutors, the pressures and prejudices of judges, the crushing brutality of incarceration, and the over-all pressure of money and burden of poverty that renders the entire objective, arm’s-length, formally coherent system of oppression circular and self-perpetuating. And it dramatizes that system in closeup, with a depiction of its practical, devastating effects on two families and others in their circle.
“If Beale Street Could Talk” is the romance of two lifelong friends who grew up in Harlem, Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne), who’s nineteen years old and works at the perfume counter of a high-end department store (she says that she’s the first black woman to hold such a job there), and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), a twenty-two-year-old black man, a sculptor. Tish lives with her parents, Sharon (Regina King) and Joseph (Colman Domingo), and her older sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris), in their Harlem apartment; Fonny (whose given name is Alonzo) has moved out of the apartment of his parents (Aunjanue Ellis and Michael Beach), and lives and sculpts in a basement apartment on Bank Street, in the West Village. Or, rather, he did—until he was arrested and incarcerated for a crime that he didn’t commit.
Like Baldwin’s novel, Jenkins’s film is dramatized from Tish’s point of view and in her voice. The movie is a memory piece, but one in which the memories have little distance; instead, they are immediate, passionate, urgent. The film’s deftly and frankly complex, interwoven time structure (amplified all the more by the intricately pleated editing) thrusts the past and the present into the same plane of thought and evokes, above all, the politics of memory—the sense that memory is constitutive of history, of the history that may not be written but is nonetheless ferociously at work in the lives of people who are themselves largely left out of the official record. That’s another injustice that compounds and enables practical ones—and Jenkins includes several sequences composed of archival photographs of black Americans to provide a real-life alternative history, and to evoke their power to inform and illuminate the present day.
Tish and Fonny’s love story is rapturous and…
