"Moonlight" Review

Moonlight is being heralded as the movie of a generation and one of the finest films of this century. On aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 98% among critics, with an average rating of 8.9 out of 10. For some perspective, the two films widely considered by critics each year to be the very best of the 2000s - Mulholland Drive and The Tree of Life - hold average RT ratings of 7.4 and 8.1 out of 10 respectively. Metacritic is another widely-respected review aggregate website on which Moonlight holds an unheard-of 99/100 rating. The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Part II and The Empire Strikes Back each hold Metacritic scores of 80/100.

Needless to say that on paper, Moonlight looks like a modern classic. Having bought into the hype and now finally seen the finished product for myself, Moonlight will likely go down as 2016's most overrated film. It isn't an especially bad film by any stretch; in fact it's impeccably acted and beautifully shot. But those pieces alone do not an outstanding picture make. You need an engaging story, and the coming-of-age beats here do very little to stand out from similar films such as Boyhood - another great, if overrated, recent coming-of-age drama. Moonlight simply falls short of being the stirring masterpiece that all the superlatives would have you believe it is.

Moonlight tells the story of Chiron, a young homosexual man from the inner city of Miami, Florida. Chiron's story is told in three parts, at three different stages in his life under three different names. In middle school, the kids all call him "Little" since he's small and easy to push around. In high school, Chiron uses his given name. As an adult, Chiron fully embraces the nickname "Black," where we find him running a dope ring in Atlanta. We see how, as "Black," Chiron's personality has been influenced by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who, along with his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae), acted as a father figure back when the kids all called him "Little." "Black" pretty much takes over following an off-screen stint in prison. For the audience, we get the sense that Chiron's tried to harden himself considering the stigma of homosexuality in gang / street culture but that this hollow façade hasn't given him any peace. This becomes most evident when "Black" reunites with Kevin (played by three different actors, most powerfully by André Holland), a friend from his high school days.

Moonlight may be one of those movies that grows on you over time. In fact, as I sit here thinking through several of Chiron's defining character moments, I find myself reminiscing on the film in a much more favorable light than I might have last Sunday night immediately after seeing it. That said, the film still has its issues.

First of which, writer/director Barry Jenkins seems content to skip over large character-changing moments in favor of capturing scenes of insignificant intimacy. Granted these are perhaps the moments that make up "real life," similar to what Linklater tried to capture in Boyhood, but here it just feels like we're missing out on something else - a grander scheme, a "bigger picture," a plot. Moonlight just feels like a two-hour string of conversations in which something truly engaging only happens every 20 minutes or so. It feels like there's a lot of stuff that happens between scenes which would've been interesting to explore, such as the influence of Chiron's sexuality during his prison stay. I only found myself fully invested in Chiron's narrative at the film's more blatantly artistic moments - flashes of blue and red lights marking transitions between the three time periods, shots of a shirtless "Little" at the beach under the violet haze of the early evening hours, and the deteriorating relationship with his mother Paula (Naomi Harris) punctuated by slow-motion Mise-en-scène and stirring musical score from Nicholas Britell. The film is full of memorable moments like these; I just wish they came together in a more satisfying narrative. 

I think that the biggest thing Moonlight has going for it - and maybe why critics have taken to it so generously - is that it lends voices to certain characters and people who are severely underrepresented in cinema. I always say that "some representation is better than none at all," but it seems a shame for such rich characters to wind up beholden to a narrative we've seen a thousand times. Chiron's journey is an interesting one at times, but I walked out underwhelmed at the end. Recommended for serious cinephiles only as well as those hoping to see all the year's big awards contenders, which this one certainly will be regardless of this reviewer's opinion.

B-