12.13.18: Philadelphia – (Culture): Mr. Barry Jenkins, the acclaimed director of Moonlight, is aware of how large a shadow his 2016 tour de force cast. But his 2018 masterpiece, If Beale Street Could Talk, will easily find a light of its own.
The first English-language film based on one of Mr. James Baldwin’s published works, Beale Street is a romantic period piece that could be set in the 21st century and its plot and social commentary would remain verbatim to the 1974 source text.
Set to premiere nationwide on Christmas Day, the film centers itself on Tish (Ms. Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Mr. Stephan James), young adults in Harlem, New York City, whose relationship is strained when Fonny is falsely accused of rape and jailed as a result.
Tish, who early in the film reveals she’s pregnant, works tirelessly to prove that the father of her unborn child is innocent. The biggest impediment to the young man’s freedom is the disappearance of the accuser, who, after being manipulated by a racist cop to implicate Fonny, flees to Puerto Rico and delays the trial.
“If these characters were allowed to exist in a vacuum, they would grow to be 87 and have 87 babies and live happily ever after. But they have to live in America,” Mr. Jenkins said in Philadelphia on Wednesday evening during a Q&A, which succeeded a private screening of the two-hour film at the Landmark Ritz at the Bourse.
Mr. Jenkins, who drafted the screenplay for Beale Street while visiting Berlin, Germany, noted that Mr. Baldwin wrote in many voices. But his two primary voices – the one obsessed with sensuality and romance, and the other which passionately calls America out on the ways in which its systems disenfranchise the lives and souls of black folks – marry seamlessly in Beale Street. Indeed, Beale Street is as much a love story as it is a tale of what’s not to love about America.
“Quite a moving thing to take the story of America in a certain way and frame it through the prism of this couple and their families,” Mr. Jenkins said.
Fonny is conscious of America’s plight. And he’s reminded of it after a tense encounter outside a grocery store with the sinister lawman who would later be responsible for his imprisonment.
Tish was grocery shopping while Fonny grabbed cigarettes at a nearby store. A white man makes unwanted advances to Tish in the brief absence of her beau. But when Fonny arrives, and sees his lover in distress, he grips up the stranger and tosses him outside and onto a pile of trash bags. The policeman sees this, runs over and inquires of what occurred.
Tish tells the cop that the man attacked her. But the officer is more intrigued at the prospects of arresting Fonny. And he attempts to do so, but is blocked by Tish and reprimanded by the older white store owner, who vouches for the two’s repeat business. The cop offers Fonny a menacing stare and tells him “I’ll see you around.”
Fonny also has a sobering conversation with his friend Daniel (Mr. Brian Tyree Henry), who he runs into on the street and invites over for drinks. Daniel is only months-free from a two-year stint in jail for stealing a car, despite not knowing how to drive.
Daniel tells Fonny that he understands why Malcolm X calls the White man “The Devil.” The white man is the Devil because he can’t be a man, Daniel says when recalling the tortures of prison.
Daniel downs beer after beer, appearing to drink in order to forget the hell he experienced and the institutional racism that was its catalyst. But the America that Daniel and Fonny experience always has a way of reminding them that racism is an enduring social construct.
“This country really do [sic] not like niggers. They will rent it to a leper first,” Fonny says.
While searching for an apartment, and encountering landlords who deny them lodging, the couple comes across a nice young White man who’s willing to rent to them. Fonny is leery of him and asks: “What’s the catch?”
Beale Street is fiction. But Mr. Baldwin’s real-life trepidation of life in New York City surely informs the work.
“I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me,” Mr. Baldwin said in 1987 when, while living in Paris, he explained to an interviewer why he had to get out of New York.
Mr. Baldwin’s estate granted Mr. Jenkins the rights to the novel four years after the 39-year-old Florida-born director drafted the screenplay. Not every scene in the book is played out on film, however. For example, you don’t see the rape victim, who claimed her attacker was a Black man, pick Fonny out of a lineup which contained all White men.
But enough scenes are shown, and words used, to stress the injustice of the American criminal justice system.
“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass,” Tish says.
But in this America, many do. Beale Street is among the realist piece of fiction produced about black life for the big screen.
Beale Street is rated R and also star Mr. Colman Domingo and Ms. Regina King.
Thanks for reading! Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® and I’m Drumming for Justice!™
Christopher “Flood the Drummer®” Norris is an award-winning journalist, online content producer and professional drummer currently serving as the CEO of Techbook Online, a Philadelphia-based news and event company, and the host of the Drumming for Justice podcast. Subscribe here.
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