![]() In the next scene, the child, Little (Chiron’s nickname when he is young), played by Alex Hibbert, interacts with the dealer we have already met, Juan, in a way I will characterize only as unexpected. The switch-up in camera style portends a switch-up of archetypes. But the next cut is to a child running through tall grass, and handheld, somewhat frenetic camera movement.” “The scene is about a dealer interacting with his guy on the corner, right? Which is a scene I think we have seen. We were at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, sitting at a table in an otherwise empty lounge. “It’s sort of a fake-out,” the film’s director of photography, James Laxton, said recently. The film opens with a very stylized, swirling shot of a drug dealer, Juan, played by the magnificent Mahershala Ali. ![]() Miami is a sublime fever dream of pastels and neon, lush greens and glistening, perspiring skin tones. Color and light are tools for transcendence, used to reframe and illuminate. But Moonlight is more Wong Kar Wai than The Wire. Dark colors and harsh light is the appropriate lens, we seem to have decided, for dark circumstances and harsh realities. When we tell stories about characters in this context, the go-to style is often a bleak realism. If the empathic power of Moonlight defies easy categorization, it can be trickier still to put your finger on what is singular about the cinematography. That it should feel so radical-for a kid from the projects to be portrayed with a complete, three-dimensional portrait-stirs up a heightened, devastating awareness of how rare a thing this is. Moonlight, which is up for six Golden Globes and is likely to earn as many Oscar nominations, leaves a lasting impression on your mind and eye, and its impact is not limited to your present field of vision. It’s merely a feature of the landscape, where air is humid, birds chirp, people disappear, and small bills flow in a circle. But the drug economy in which the characters live does not define them as human beings. Dollars from the household of a dealer may end up in Chiron’s pocket and later in the hands of Chiron’s mother, who doubtless will return them to a dealer. A person may deal drugs for money, but no moral baggage is ascribed to this detail it recedes into the background, having nothing whatever to do with their value system. There is at least one unifying element, though: the film’s insistence that the humanity of every character be brought to the fore. It is difficult to sum up all that feels new about Moonlight, which puts a fresh lens on so many things at once. The two men didn’t know each other at the time, but they have together brought the hyper specificity and full emotional heft of their lived experience to bear on the story of Chiron, a poor, black, and gay boy who comes of age in a Liberty City housing project. Jenkins’s mom contracted HIV McCraney’s died of AIDS. Jenkins, 37, was raised by a single mother who became addicted to crack. So did Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play on which the movie is based, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Barry Jenkins, the screenwriter and director behind the beautiful new film Moonlight, grew up in Liberty City, the Miami neighborhood where the story is set.
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