If Beale Street Could Talk

Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Oscar-winning debut, MOONLIGHT, swept audiences along the festival circuit. His follow up has a similar effect at the Toronto International Film Festival where press, industry and other festival-goers have been buzzing since its premiere last night.

Adapted from the novel by James Baldwin, BEALE STREET tells us the story of Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne), whom he gets pregnant before being imprisoned on a false accusation of rape orchestrated by a racist police officer.

Baldwin, a god with words, is recognized as much for his books as his oratory genius—see his 1967 debate with William F. Buckley.  He’d given scores of interviews to dispel many of the myths that dehumanized Black people in the 1970s. At the beginning of the decade, he relocated to France. America, he argued, had left him behind first.

As Prof. Rosa Bobia of Kennesaw State University writes, “Since the seventies, If Beale Street Could Talk retains a presence in France in academic studies both at the high school and university level. This presence eventually led to the distinction of France and not the United States as the site of the adaptation of the novel to the screen: the film debuted on December 9, 1998 as A la place du coeur, a ‘comédie dramatique’ that takes place in Marseilles.”

Based partly on Benoit Depardieu’s doctoral thesis on the psychoanalytical aspects of fatherhood, Dr. Bobia’s 2003 article in Revue/LISA gives hints that adapting Baldwin to the screen is inherently problematic. His omnipresent voice is too strong. I could listen to twelve hours of Baldwin speaking, but newcomer KiKi Layne is perhaps a little out of her depth as the primary narrator of Tish’s struggle to exonerate Fonny for a crime he didn’t commit.

The film is a master class in composition, influenced heavily by Demy’s LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG. From the metronomic cadence of a bird’s eye crane shot of the two lovers in which the camera waltzes over their heads as they walk in lockstep, their wardrobes popping off the grey-brown cobblestone, to a warmly-lit dolly shot of Fonny working on a wooden sculpture, to an intimate profile of Tish’s face—as in MOONLIGHT, cinematographer James Laxton focuses intimately on the textures and shapes of Black actors’ faces.

As Mr. and Mrs. Rivers, Colman Domingo and Regina King match the calibre of Stephan James’ acting, particularly when the latter travels to Cuba to find the woman who mistakenly (or intentionally) identified her husband in a rigged line-up set up by a racist officer who had earlier wrongly implicated Fonny in an altercation outside of a convenience store.

Jenkins rightly attempts to connect these moments to historical images of Black strife, but it’s simultaneously derivative and misplaced despite a superbly-acted setup in the opening scene in which Tish announces her pregnancy to her family. We just aren’t invested enough in the characters for it to connect as meaningfully as it deserves to, and Layne isn’t experienced enough to shoulder the responsibility of persuading us through what could have been a more compelling journey.