With little screen time, their co-stars, Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, both leave a lasting impact felt long after the final credit has rolled. Alex Hibbert (Little), Ashton Sanders (Middle), and Trevante Rhodes (Big) play three versions of this same person but, together though separate, awesomely and seamlessly provide one solid and wholly believable through-line.
It exudes beauty in tragedy, providing the perfect backdrop as a man slowly finds himself.
Thankfully, Jenkins and Laxton capture this all in a truly cinematic fashion, forgoing handheld in lieu of a good old-fashioned stationary camera. There are colorful qualities to these often-dark lives, which is definitely an authentically human quality. In these highlighted moments, there's the hurtful but loving mother, the kind-hearted but socially despicable father figure and our protagonist, a lost little boy grown into a callous criminal. Notice too that these aforementioned scenes also bely this duality. The vicious visceral sense of the term 'black and blue' in regards to bruising only compounds this notion. Just look at the film's poster, which showcases the three faces of Chiron as one in stark black and blue. Life is not simply black and white it's black and blue-dark moments punctuated by color. And that's the splendor of Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton's unified vision. Almost everything - from the rolling surf where a fatherly drug dealer takes young Chiron for his first ocean dip to the clothes worn by a teenage Chiron's abusive mother to the streetlights of nighttime Miami where a hardened adult-aged Chiron peddles narcotics - exudes an almost ethereal blueish hue. Beyond the title and narrative, there is also the matter of color. The film takes its inspiration from In the Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, an unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McRaney, in more ways than one. At times heart-tugging and heart-wrenching (sometimes at the same time), there are many things to love about Moonlight, beginning with its source. Weighing the film with these heaviest of laurels only serves to put an albatross around its neck, dashing expectations along the way and undermining its beauty in another way.
However, the truth is that Moonlight is good but not THAT good. To say that Academy voters gave Moonlight the Best Picture trophy due to white guilt or a self-back-patting PR-move truly undermines a beautifully acted and shot achievement in filmmaking. Given the backlash surrounding the 'Oscars So White' brouhaha, however (in which the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences barely put forth any African-American nominees), this independent gem improbably claimed the year's top prize. Truly, in any other year or awards cycle, this film might have found itself in the also-ran category. In this R-rated Oscar winner, director Barry Jenkins chronicles the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young, African-American, gay man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. As tender as it is tough as it is true, three-tiered coming-of-age drama Moonlight is a near-master class character study that almost reaches the vaunted heights of its A+ reputation.
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