by STEPHEN G. HALL
Moonlight poster PHOTO/A24
Sunday night’s mishap at the Oscars, which mistakenly gave the award for Best Picture to La La Land, reflects the unpredictable nature of award shows and the unexpected impact of film on reframing our understandings of the world. Made with a small budget of one million dollars and highlighting same-sex love in black communities, Moonlight is a sleeper surprise. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s award-winning play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins, defies our expectations about filmmaking, masculinity, Blackness, and the power of love to conquer time and space.
Moonlight is an extremely powerful exploration of black manhood. It is cinematography at its best and nothing short of a visceral masterpiece. Set in the gritty concrete jungle of Liberty City, one of two black communities in Miami, the film is a coming-of-age story. It is framed around the interrelated and conjoined stories of a drug-addicted mother and a drug dealer and his common-law wife, both of whom facilitate the maturation of the film’s central character, Chiron. An extremely young man who struggles with his nascent homosexuality, Chiron is a man-child in the moonlight. As a man-child in the moonlight, he negotiates the complex terrain related to maintaining an outward facade of masculinity clothed in toughness and the inner turbulence of his nascent homosexuality. This negotiation creates a resolvable tension in the film which is worked out under the magical luminescence of the moonlight.
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