Barry Jenkins brings the same dreamy, ethereal style he used so effectively in "Moonlight" to this screen adaptation of the James Baldwin novel, but this time around it feels ill matched to the material.
Baldwin was poetic, but he was also angry, and rightly so. "If Beale Street Could Talk" does a good job of showing how the things whites in America can take for granted -- falling in love, getting married, having children, building a life together with the person of your choice -- are a series of trials for blacks. Nothing but a bunch of road blocks stand in the way of the young couple at the center of the movie and their happiness. But what I missed from Jenkins' version of this story is the anger that such a state of affairs existed then and still exists now. "Beale Street" should have a sense of immediacy in our current times, but it instead feels overshadowed to me by other films this year like "BlackkKlansman" and "Sorry to Bother You," films that ask its audience to stand up and take notice. "Beale Stree," in its slowness and pursuit of formal perfection, asks its audience to take a snooze.
KiKi Layne, who plays the young pregnant woman at the film's center, was I think a big part of the problem. She doesn't give a strong performance, and so this young girl who was supposed to come across as innocent but strong, comes across instead as somewhat vapid. Much better performances come from the actors who play her parents, Regina King and Colman Domingo, and the only time the movie really sparks is when one of those two is on screen. Sparks really fly in the scene when they announce their daughter's pregnancy to her boyfriend's family, but that scene is so overdone, and the characters of the boyfriend's mom and sisters played so exaggeratedly, that it comes across as ludicrous instead of powerful. At other times, Jenkins greatly underplays it, to the point where you want to prod him and ask him to pick up the pace a little. It's a very uneven movie, and I had a lot of trouble losing myself in the world it creates even though I really wanted to.
Grade: B
Baldwin was poetic, but he was also angry, and rightly so. "If Beale Street Could Talk" does a good job of showing how the things whites in America can take for granted -- falling in love, getting married, having children, building a life together with the person of your choice -- are a series of trials for blacks. Nothing but a bunch of road blocks stand in the way of the young couple at the center of the movie and their happiness. But what I missed from Jenkins' version of this story is the anger that such a state of affairs existed then and still exists now. "Beale Street" should have a sense of immediacy in our current times, but it instead feels overshadowed to me by other films this year like "BlackkKlansman" and "Sorry to Bother You," films that ask its audience to stand up and take notice. "Beale Stree," in its slowness and pursuit of formal perfection, asks its audience to take a snooze.
KiKi Layne, who plays the young pregnant woman at the film's center, was I think a big part of the problem. She doesn't give a strong performance, and so this young girl who was supposed to come across as innocent but strong, comes across instead as somewhat vapid. Much better performances come from the actors who play her parents, Regina King and Colman Domingo, and the only time the movie really sparks is when one of those two is on screen. Sparks really fly in the scene when they announce their daughter's pregnancy to her boyfriend's family, but that scene is so overdone, and the characters of the boyfriend's mom and sisters played so exaggeratedly, that it comes across as ludicrous instead of powerful. At other times, Jenkins greatly underplays it, to the point where you want to prod him and ask him to pick up the pace a little. It's a very uneven movie, and I had a lot of trouble losing myself in the world it creates even though I really wanted to.
Grade: B