Sometimes directors adapting specific writers make so much sense you wish they’d team up more. Michael Lewis’s The Big Short could only have been properly made by the talented funny Adam McKay. Taika Waititi, an offbeat New Zealander, might have something funny to say about Thor, a superhero from distant sometimes strange lands. And now, we have James Baldwin, one of the great African-American intellectuals, having a story adapted by Barry Jenkins, the man who gave us Moonlight. If Beale Street Could Talk showcases that perfect pair, using Baldwin’s elegiac prose and Jenkins’s visual style to tell a timely and timeless love story.
The love story is between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne), and Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt (Stephan James). The two were childhood friends in New York, slowly realizing they really cared for one another. Tish becomes pregnant, which delights her mother (Regina King), father (Colman Domingo), sister (Teyonah Parris), and Fonny’s father (Michael Beach), but pisses off Fonny’s mother (Aunjanue Ellis). If that was the only complication for Tish and Fonny, that would have been a cake walk; however, Fonny has also been put into prison, and faces a long road out of the criminal justice system in the United States.
It was not my intention to make If Beale Street Could Talk sound as bleak as that last paragraph, but there are moments of deep sadness. Tish and Fonny’s romance doesn’t have any internal challenges; all of them come externally. Baldwin, the clever writer, makes most of their challenges systemic. For the African-American community, this baby could be seen by some as a child born of sin, and Mrs. Hunt blames Tish for tempting and manipulating her boy. Both fathers of the kids know that money is going to be an issue, so they have a real discussion of how to provide for this kid, knowing Fonny won’t be able to early on. Then there’s the reason Fonny is in jail: a woman (Emily Rios) accuses him of sexual assault, with a white police officer (Ed Skrein) that doesn’t like Fonny, featuring heavily into the accusations. The woman escapes back to Puerto Rico, and the family has no real means to get her back to testify, knowing Fonny did not commit this crime.
You’d think with all these forces bearing down on the couple, they would just pack it in and give up. However, Barry Jenkins gives their romance a timeless quality, which makes it seem as strong or stronger than any other. He uses sumptuous visual style that you can almost taste, and this jazz music to help transport you out of time with the couple. You see most of the stronger members of the family rallying around it, doing everything they can to help the couple succeed. Sometimes the rallying is really funny, like when Tish’s sister dresses down the Hunt women, and sometimes the rallying is downright heroic, like watching Tish and Fonny’s parents use their skills to try to get Fonny out of prison. Smartly, the story doesn’t always have them succeed because of the circumstances they’re fighting uphill against, but damn if they’re not gonna try. They don’t always succeed, but everyone is going to rally around this precious child, so it has the best possible upbringing it could have.
The high points of If Beale Street Could Talk are when the Baldwin Jenkins mixture finds it’s perfect blend, like at Tish’s job selling perfumes, describing how Tish distributes the perfume to different people. Moments like that make Beale Street this beautiful visual poem, describing and showing a situation in a way that you can almost smell the perfume yourself. I hope to see more Jenkins/Baldwin pairings in the future if they can look and feel as wonderful as Beale Street does.