Moonlight

MOONLIGHT

Director : Barry Jenkins
Year : 2017
Genre : Drama
Rating : ****

Ever since it's triumphant premiere last September at the prestigious Telluride film festival, Barry Jenkins' stunningly intimate, wonderfully mature and exquisitely shot coming-of-age drama 'Moonlight' has been met with both astonishing critical acclaim and tremendous box office success. Nominated and indeed winning some of the most revered awards in the industry, the film is one of the highest rated in recent memory and of course this Sunday, 'Moonlight' took home the coveted Academy Award for Best Picture after its closest rival 'La La Land' was, quite horrifyingly, mistakenly named in its place. 

But now that the confetti (and indeed the shock) has settled, the question to ask in the wake of this unprecedented blunder is whether 'Moonlight' is indeed more worthy of the Best Picture Oscar than Damien Chazelle's musical masterpiece. In my humble opinion it isn't but then again, 'La La Land' wasn't the best film of last year either so take from that what you will.

Adapted from the unpublished semi-autobiographical play 'In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue' by Tarell Alvin McCraney, 'Moonlight' tells the three chaptered story of Chiron, a young African-American boy who must learn to come to terms with his burgeoning homosexuality on the harsh streets of 1980's Miami. Played by three different actors over the course of the film, Chiron is a fascinatingly complex individual and the trio of very talented performers who play him over the course of his life (sequentially Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes) all manage to capture both the resilience and vulnerability that makes the character of Chiron so believable. The gay black community is a demographic that has been very poorly represented in cinema and I really hope that 'Moonlight' helps to open doors for black homosexual directors, actors and writers who wish to explore their own stories on the big screen in the future.

But while the three young actors who portray the central figure of Chiron are all brilliant, it is the supporting performances by British actress Naomie Harris and the now Academy Award winning Mahershala Ali who really are the true stars of 'Moonlight'. As Chiron's cocaine-addled mother Paula, Harris is simply spellbinding - delivering a very powerful and sometimes startlingly fearsome performance (the best of her career so far) while 'House Of Cards' star Ali, despite his relatively small amount of screentime, gives one of the best acting jobs of the year as the uvuncular crack dealer who becomes a father figure to the increasingly emotionally frustrated Chiron.

While its story may somewhat familiar to the indie/art house crowd, 'Moonlight' is still undoubtedly a truly remarkable piece of cinema that takes one man's turbulent life and brings to us a delicate, poignant, timeless and incredibly moving portrait of identity and self-reliance. It's directed to within an inch of it's life by the brilliant Jenkins, it's shot with precision and extreme beauty by cinematographer James Paxton who deftly captures every frame of the film with a mystically evocative ambience and it's Academy Award winning script, adapted from the play by Jenkins and original author McCraney, says very little but ultimately says everything it needs or possibly could ever want to say. Underscoring all of this is Nicholas Brittel's plaintive yet deeply haunting orchestration which echo both the emotional yearning and psychological torment of our lead protagonist.

I must admit that on the night, I was rather disappointed that 'La La Land' lost out on the biggest prize in Hollywood but the more I have thought about 'Moonlight', the more I have come to love it and the more I have come to realise it's significance in our culture. Yes, on a technical level, it may not match the high-kicking theatrics of it's crowd-pleasing counterpart while it's cinematic ambitions may not be as tall as those of the massively talented Chazelle's; now the youngest Academy Award winning director in history. But a film made up of an entirely black cast that tells the story of a young gay black kid growing up amongst a world of violence and drugs has just won the Oscar for Best Picture and that is certainly something to celebrate - regardless of age, creed, colour, gender or sexuality.