If Beale Street Could Talk
In Widows, Brian Tyree Henry plays a man attempting to cover up a sinister past by wresting power from the white institutions who put him in such a compromised position in the first place, but in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, for 12 minutes or so, he completely occupies the screen helplessly unable to cover up anything, something so much more fundamentally evil haunting him, compromising him beyond anything we can imagine.
Or maybe we can: In the one scene in which we see the night that would become a young black man’s futile alibi for a crime he didn’t commit, Daniel (Henry) has dinner with his old friend, woodworker Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), and the man’s partner Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne), nervously asking for beer and cigarettes as he gradually reveals what he’s been up to recently. The answer is simple enough: He’s been in jail, out for only a few months, and things are “bad,” though Daniel doesn’t elaborate. We understand enough, or so we think—he’s a black man in 1970s New York, and even within the context of the film itself, everything that happens opposes the mere existence of our many characters, all black people but for a conspicuous few.
But then, clutching his cigarette for dear life, his eyes welling, Daniel begins to etch out a baser idea of what life in jail was like for him. What it meant for “they” to be able to so manipulate him, control him, destroy him—there, inside, he whispers or screams (it’s hard to tell, volume devastated by the urgency and pain in Daniel’s retelling) they’re capable of getting someone like him to do anything. Daniel doesn’t elaborate; cinematographer James Laxton’s camera is uncomfortably close to Henry, hushed and searching his face for…something, anything, relief maybe?—but so, so reluctant to look Daniel straight in his eyes, which wouldn’t be notable were Jenkins’ film not so occupied with staring straight into his characters’ pupils. Because to look Daniel, and Henry, in the eyes in that moment would be an act of Sisyphean proportions. Because we know, in 12 minutes, that nothing has changed in almost 50 years.
From there—a nadir, or one of Jenkins’ greatest moments—the film vortexes outward, time for our characters elliptical, and the love story between Tish and Fonny the rhythm we’ll return to over and over. As our narrator, Tish speaks in both curt statements and koans, Jenkins’ screenplay translating James Baldwin’s novel as an oneiric bit of voyeurism: When the two finally consummate their relationship after a lifetime (barely two decades) of friendship between them and their families, the mood is divine and revelatory. Do people actually have sex like that? God no, but maybe we wish we did? And sometimes we convince ourselves we have, with the right person, just two bodies alone, against the world, in a space—maybe the only space—of their own.
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