So, I did something like this once before. Back in 2018, I did the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movies list over at Gabbing Geek. It was fun and challenging. True, I had seen about 2/3 of the films beforehand, but for the ones I hadn’t, I found some genuinely good movies that I otherwise might not have seen (or even heard of in one example). I’d been thinking about doing it again, but I wasn’t sure which list to go with. I could do the revised AFI list, but I figure if I did that, I should just cover the films that were new to that list. I ended up going with one on Stacker.com, one that for some reason has Dr. Strangelove listed twice (the one instance should be Casablanca). Their methodology appealed to me: using grades from IMDB and Metacritic to get films that appealed both to critics and mass audiences, they put together basically a mathematically-based list of 100 films.
Besides, only about 30 of the movies on Stacker’s list were part of the AFI challenge, and while I do plan to rewatch and write those 30 up again, I also want to try to say different things about them, so the less I see in common between the two lists, the better. Plus, Stacker’s list includes a number of foreign language movies I’ve never seen, and I can get behind something like that.
With that in mind, starting at the bottom of the list and working my way up, is 2016’s Moonlight, a film I initially saw in theaters and for this time around found on Showtime.
Here’s something that I will be looking forward to for movies I am returning to for the first time in years: seeing things I just plain didn’t notice before. I remember seeing Moonlight and largely liking it, but the only actor I really recognized at the time was Mahershala Ali, an actor I knew from Netflix’s House of Cards and Luke Cage. The idea that the guy would become a major movie star was something of a shock to me at the time given those projects, especially House of Cards, weren’t exactly making him stand out to me all that much. But I’ll say more about Ali later. Rewatching the film for this challenge, I recognized more that I probably didn’t notice all that much in 2016, starting with the A24 logo. Yeah, probably not the first time I’d seen A24’s logo, and I think when I saw this film, it may not have registered the same way. Now I connect it to, if not great films, than at least ones that are different from the ones bigger studios release. But then there are supporting turns from Janelle Monae as Ali’s girlfriend and Naomi Harris as the mother of main character Chiron, to say nothing of Andre Holland and Trevante Rhodes as the adult versions of Kevin and Chiron. I just saw Monae in the excellent Knives Out sequel, and Harris appeared in a number of the recent James Bond movies. Holland and Rhodes themselves have become rather familiar faces for me as well, though let’s face it: Ali was the one with the breakout performance in this film.
And why wouldn’t he? The film is divided into three sections, all of them following a young man named Chiron as he grows up to be the man he will be. But Ali only appears in the first one in person as Juan, a drug dealer who sells crack to Chiron’s mother. The thing is, having seen a lot of fictional drug dealers, it was a bit of a pleasant surprise that the sorts of things I might have come to expect from that sort of character is completely absent from Juan. He isn’t violent in any way. He actually cares for young Chiron, a boy he finds hiding in an abandoned building and takes home for dinner in the form of a meal with his girlfriend Teresa, and even giving the boy a place to sleep for the night. Chiron, called “Little” as in “Little Man” in the first part, finds a father-figure in Juan, someone who actually offer a solid moral example on how to be a man. Chiron is often called gay by others. He doesn’t know what that means, and Juan and Teresa seem to be the only people Chiron knows who seem to be accepting of homosexuality. God knows Chiron’s mother and classmates seem to use that as an excuse to berate or beat up the boy.
Whether or not Chiron actually is gay seems besides the point, truth be told. He is, but it’s the sort of thing where other people were aware of Chiron’s sexuality before he was. That seems to include Kevin, his only real friend, the kid who nicknames him “Black” due to his dark complexion, and even then, Kevin doesn’t always rush to Chiron’s defense all that often in either of the first two sections of the film, but I may be getting ahead of myself.
I would say so because despite the fact the last time the film shows Juan, he’s looking rather ashamed of himself when young Chiron asks the man who’s been kinder to him than anyone else he deals with on a routine basis whether or not Juan is the one who sells Chiron’s mother her crack. He is, and he isn’t proud of that fact. Beyond that, though, this film seems to treat dealing drugs as a business like any other. Chiron himself grows up to deal drugs, but he handles the business the same way Juan did: like a business. He’s clearly copied his look and style after Juan, and though Juan died between the first and second sections of the film, his influence hangs over the rest. Teresa appears in the second, is referenced in the third, and is still part of Chiron’s life, but Juan is clearly the man who Chiron used as a model.
That said, I think kudos are also owed to Harris as Chiron’s mother Paula. In the first section, she may not be mother of the year, but she does seem to have a job as a nurse. In the second, her drug addiction has led her to prostitution, and in the final one, Chiron visits her in rehab. Harris has a distinct character arc of her own, and it’s nice to see Chiron is maybe offering her something for the first time in years, and that maybe the two can forge new relationship. She’s the only member of the cast to appear in all three sections, and she acquits herself well in each one.
The film ends with a reunion between Chiron and Kevin. Chiron had long since left his Miami childhood home to ply his trade in Atlanta, and his reason to return seems to be a surprise call from Kevin. The two had had something of a sexual encounter as teenagers, and while he never says that’s what he’s doing down there, it does seem clear that Chiron is hoping to find some sort of love with Kevin. I remember this final scene from my first viewing, and I remember the sexual tension in the air. Chiron doesn’t know if Kevin will reciprocate the feelings Chiron has for his old friend, and even as I am myself not a gay man, I did like the way this final scene went, ending as the film does with the two laying in bed together. Chiron grew up in a tough neighborhood, and his growth comes down to whether or not he can admit to any kind of emotional weakness. He couldn’t as a small child. He just shut down and didn’t talk. He couldn’t as a teenager because he was at the bottom of the social ladder as it was in a culture that didn’t encourage the sharing of feelings. He can as an adult, one who may look like the tough guy on the outside, but inside, he’s just a man who needs a connection with someone.
You know, just like everyone else.
Director Barry Jenkins chose to end the film in a way that showed adult Chiron flashing back to his childhood in the beach. It’s a way to connect the adult to the child, and it’s the sort of thing that underlines what a tender story this is. There are many stories about African American children growing up in bad neighborhoods, dodging gangs and drug dealers, but I don’t think there has ever been one as sensitive or as nuanced as Moonlight in depicting the tender, emotional growth of a man who had a lot going against him and, ultimately, came out as what appears to be an emotionally mature individual who maybe got the love he always wanted and rarely seemed to receive.
NEXT: Up next is the reason I actually started watching the movies at the tail end of 2022 instead of waiting for the new year to start. It’s the 2003 Italian movie The Best of Youth, and it’s over six hours long. I’m gonna need to get comfortable for this one.
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