‘Moonlight’ is a movie that matters

Moonlight
Moonlight is a triptych about growing up black, gay and poor. When he is nine or 10 he is called Little, he was just that, smaller than all of the other kids his age. They pick on him mercilessly, and he is terrified enough to lock himself in a crack house, where he is found by a man named Juan who deals crack but is the closest thing he will ever have to a father. When he is 16 or 17 he is Chiron, his given name, he is gangly and tall, and he is both meek and angry, at his mother who is addicted to crack and at the boys at school who have graduated from brats to bullies. When he is in his 20s, finally he is Black, his exterior hardened by muscle and by jail and the streets and by making his living doing what Juan did. But he is still Little and still Chiron, his mother’s wounds always, already fresh, and he is still haunted by the friendship he had with the one boy who – mostly – treated him with kindness, as someone worthy of love.

The film is artful, literary, gorgeous, upsetting, moving and loving. Barry Jenkins, currently being feted by film critics around the world, has made a movie that is reminiscent at times of Boyhood, Pariah, Beautiful Thing and Boys in the Hood, and yet is wholly original. The immediately striking thing about Moonlight is how gorgeously filmed it is, with Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton using dawn, dusk, the searing midday sun of south Florida, and, of course, the grace of moonlight in compositions that are sometimes marked by hand-held naturalism and sometimes crafted like the photos of Gordon Parks, Mary-Ellen Mark and Jamel Shabazz. If it was just the imagery, Moonlight would be great, but Jenkins’s script, from a story by Tarell McCraney, structured both perfectly and schematically, is just as beautiful and skillful, creating indelible characters with economical, sometimes poetic lines, aging and maturing Chiron, his mother and his friend Kevin with strategic precision and overflowing empathy.

And then there’s the acting. Alex R. Hibbert plays Little, terrified, needy and sweet; he’s so believable, this third can feel like documentary. Chiron is played by preternaturally gifted Ashton Sanders, whose awkwardness, sadness and fury are both the literal and actual center of the film. Finally, Trevante Rhodes is Black. Rhodes looks like some sort of cross between 50 Cent and Tyson Beckford, and that bulk and beauty is perhaps too much of a transformation, but Rhodes shows the cracks in the perfect sculpture through the subtlest change in his eyes, from a confrontation with his mother to an at-long-last meeting with Kevin, now played by jokey, confident, sexy André Holland. Naomie Harris has an epic transformation as Chiron’s mother, and her talent and Jenkins’ direction prevent her from becoming the cartoon that Monique, in a similar but more explosive role, was in Precious. Meanwhile, the immensely charismatic and beautifully subtle  Mahershala Ali plays the drug dealer with a heart of gold not as some societal oddity but as an everyman doing both the right thing and the things he needs to survive.

Moonlight is an important movie, and not only because critics have tapped it to win Oscars, but because it’s deeply affecting. It matters. At the late, Tuesday night showing of when I saw it, the theater was packed with one of the most diverse audiences I’ve ever been part of. All of the people were there to see a movie about growing up gay and African American, about masculinity and poverty, about redemption. Many people were there because of Moonlight’s awards buzz, and I’m thrilled that their minds and hearts will be expanded by the experience. But most were there because it was what they wanted and what they needed to see, because it was their story or similar to their story: as gay, or black, or poor, or all three. Seeing this – seeing us, with us writ large – reflected on the screen is rare, and it’s especially rare for the reflection to be so aesthetically rich and so emotionally resonant.

Moonlight
Written and Directed by Barry Jenkins
Starring Trevante Rhodes, Naomi Harris and Mahershala Ali
Rated R

Originally published in somewhat different form in LGBT Weekly

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King Cobra

Continuing his long string of occasionally artful, but mostly exploitative gay roles, James Franco has given us King Cobra, the tawdry and dopey story of the porn star and San Diego gay celebrity Brent Corrigan, his Svengali director at Cobra Video, and the dumb-as-dirt couple who murdered the latter. As most know, Franco, who produced and co-stars as one of the killers, is not gay, but he loves playing gay and teasing us with vaguely gay antics. I can see why he was drawn to the story of Brent Corrigan, because it’s scandalous and ridiculous. But as directed and written by Justin Kelly, it’s those things, and that’s it. Unclear whether it’s a comedy, a thriller or a gay Lifetime film, King Cobra ends up being mostly silly. I was entertained, but not for the right reasons.

King Cobra

Available on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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This dark side of suburbia is somewhat unoriginal

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train

In novels, I love unreliable narrators. I find the precarity of the truth titillating, even thrilling, especially as I slowly discover that what I’m reading isn’t to be trusted. I become a detective, looking for clues to what is really going on. It’s why I love Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Peter Cameron’s Andorra, and, in recent years, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, turned into the excellent film directed by Joe Wright. But as great as Wright’s film is, the revelation that the narrator isn’t reliable is so much less powerful than it is in the book, because we don’t imagine her crafting the images that we see; in the book, it’s clear that every word is hers, so every lie is hers. In the adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ massive bestseller The Girl on the Train, a novel with three unreliable narrators, director Tate Taylor has a similar problem: How does he thrill us with precarity of truth? If he’s too subtle, people will be confused. If he’s too blunt … well, there’s no if. He and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson decided to be as blunt as the rock used to commit the murder at the center of the novel.

Emily Blunt (see what I did there?) plays Rachel, the titular character. She takes the train back-and-forth from the Hudson River suburbs of New York to Manhattan every day. One house she passes is occupied by beautiful Megan (Haley Bennett) and her husband Scott (Luke Evans), and she imagines and fantasizes about their perfect romance. It’s pretty clear from the audience’s perspective that Megan doesn’t look too happy, and then we realize that Rachel isn’t either and, in turn, is always drunk; she keeps vodka in her water bottle, slurs her words and wobbles when she walks. And she makes many, many mistakes, like deciding to get off the train to visit her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), with whom he cheated on Rachel and with whom he now has a baby, which Rachel could never give him. Oh, they live next door to Megan and Scott. Megan looks a lot like Anna; Megan, to alleviate boredom, is a part-time nanny for Anna and Tom.

One day, Rachel is particularly drunk and decides to get off the train and stumble toward Tom and Anna’s house. Suddenly, it’s the next day, and she’s in her apartment, filthy and covered in blood and bruises. And Megan is missing. Immediately, both Rachel and everyone in the audience wonder if Rachel killed Megan, having confused her with Anna. Rachel, because she makes bad decisions both drunk and sober, decides to insert herself into the investigation, convincing Scott that Megan was having an affair with her therapist, which accidentally convinces the police that Scott might be a murderer. When Tom and Anna see Rachel hanging around, they repeatedly tell her to stay away, that she’s a crazy drunk, and so on and so forth. Flashbacks, sex scenes, plot twists ensue, and eventually the various scenes are shown in a different way, making it as clear as a bell that Rachel, Megan and Anna are all lying to themselves or have been lied to. None of it makes full sense until the last ten minutes, when the climactic revelation is accompanied by ham-handed symbolism so ridiculous the screening audience I saw it with guffawed.

To be fair, The Girl on the Train is suspenseful enough and handsomely made enough to be entertaining, in a Lifetime movie sort of way. But its themes concerning the dark side of suburbia are so obvious and so unoriginal that Lifetime seems like the only place such a film would seem shocking. Both Theroux and Evans are fine (in performance and looks), but they exists as symbols, not characters. The cold vapidity of both Bennet and Ferguson don’t create any sort of sympathy or antipathy, and Blunt’s performance of drunken clichés is so over-the-top as to be, more than not, laughable. An unreliable narrator should give you chills, not the giggles.

The Girl on the Train

Directed by Tate Taylor

Written by Erin Cressida Wilson

Starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson and Justin Theroux

Rated R

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SNL’s Chris Kelly makes a remarkable directorial debut

Jesse Plemons and Molly Shannon in Other People

The odd distribution plan for the exceptional Other People says a great deal about how film has changed with the advent of streaming services, especially in regards to independent film. In the past, movies with tiny budgets and niche audiences (especially gay ones) could only be found in art houses in large cities before showing up on video many months later. Other People opened in a handful of theaters in the United States Sept. 9 – and none were in San Diego – but it also became simultaneously available online to rent for half the price of one of the theater tickets. While the experience of seeing any movie in a theater is always preferable to seeing it on TV, Other People is not Gravity or The Tree of Life – it’s a comic drama set mostly in suburban Sacramento and the focus is on the writing, acting, and interpersonal emotions, not landscapes, special effects, and narrative sweep. Your TV is fine. And seeing it at home might be best when you’re in the midst of an ugly cry.

Other People, a hit at Sundance that closed Outfest in Los Angeles this summer, is the directorial debut of Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly. It is both funny enough to have left me with sore stomach muscles and sad enough to earn my own ugly tears. Based on his own experience dealing with his mother’s death, the film focuses on Kelly’s alter ego David (Jesse Plemons), a struggling comedy writer who returns home to Sacramento from New York after his mother Joanne (Molly Shannon) has been diagnosed with cancer. David has broken up with his long-term boyfriend Paul (Zach Woods) but doesn’t want to tell anyone in his family, not his mother who doesn’t need to worry about David and not his father Norman (Bradley Whitford) who can’t handle, or even speak of, David’s gayness. Joanne is fabulous and funny and she does her best to stay positive as her condition worsens. David, while helping his mother in every way he can, is wracked with self-loathing, doubt, early grieving and loneliness. When he can, he spends time with a childhood friend Gabe (John Early), whose little brother (J.J. Totah) is a precocious gay tween.

The film opens with Joanne’s death, so the ending is pre-determined, focusing the film on David and his relationships rather than on the tension of whether or not Joanne’s cancer will beat her. Kelly’s writing, both in his raw, off-kilter humor and his finely observed emotional realism, is exquisite, part Stephen Falk (You’re the Worst), part Andrew Haigh (Weekend), part Woody Allen. His direction is also striking, with smartly controlled, carefully detailed scenes featuring excellent performances from the leads, supporters and even cameos. Most notable is, of course, Molly Shannon’s truly great, Oscar-worthy performance as Joanne. It features her trademarked ebullience and enthusiasm, but she also is just as effective in subtle, quiet, raw moments as she is when she’s the life of the party. She’s brave, brilliant and devastating.

Jesse Plemons and Bradley Whitford are both fantastic, too. Plemons, perhaps with two too many ticks, is the rare gay lead without overly straight or stereotypical affectations; he’s a recognizable, complex, messy man. Whitford complicates the homophobic father, making him not a bigot, but instead limited and cloistered and simply ill-at-ease. In smaller roles, June Squib, John Early and particularly the outrageous Totah prevent even the short, filler scenes from slowing the film down. It’s a small film, but a remarkable one, worthy of the widest attention possible.

Other People

Written and directed by Chris Kelly

Starring Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon and Bradley Whitford

Rated R

Available to rent and own on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play

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Author: The JT Leroy Story

Opens at Hillcrest Landmark Sept. 23

Twenty years ago, the it author of the moment – at least in avant garde, hipster, queer circles – was Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy, better known as JT Leroy. A teenage sex worker, vagrant and drug addict turned literary wunderkind, Leroy started publishing autobiographical stories in 1996, when he was 16. In 1999, he released two lyrical, dark and shocking books, the novel Sarah and the story collection The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, to immense acclaim. He had a following of major literary and arts figures, including novelists Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson, memorist Mary Karr and poet Sharon Olds and rockstars Shirley Manson of Garbage, Courtney Love of Hole and particularly Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. But in 2005, several journalists figured out that Leroy didn’t exist. His writing was done by the much older San Franciscan Laura Alpert and his personal appearances made by Alpert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop. The scandal was bizarre and titillating and embarrassing for a number of people, and Jeff Feuerzeig’s fantastic documentary Author: The JT Leroy Story does the seeming impossible: makes sense of the whole thing.

Feuerzeig is both lucky and skilled. His subject is Alpert, who not only is unflinching in the recounting of her story, admitting every detail and explaining her practical and psychological reasoning, but she also kept everything. We are privy to her drawings, hand-written writings and the numerous recordings she kept of her conversations with everyone from Courtney Love to Dennis Cooper. Feuerzeig edited Alpert’s archives along with old press footage, amateur recordings and new interviews, creating a beautiful, seamless monument to fame, fiction, psychopathology and fraud. Author is an instructive history lesson, but it is also entertaining in a way that I never was able to find Leroy’s writing: it is funny and moving and, most importantly, true.

Originally published in LGBT Weekly

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The little men steal this show

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz in Little Men

Ira Sachs, the director of the acclaimed gay films Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange, is a subtle filmmaker. There’s nothing flashy in his shots or his dialogue, and he doesn’t push his actors to histrionics; his movies are naturalistic portrayals of real people struggling with family duty, class, aging and love. With the title of his latest, Little Men, I assumed Sachs had made a movie about teenage boys in some kind of love, or possibly a modern-day adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel. Rather, it’s about friendship, real estate and guilt, with Sachs’ usual gay themes absent or sublimated. Little Men is perhaps too realistic to be satisfying, but it is nevertheless wise, moving, and impeccably made.

Jake (Theo Taplitz) is the artistic, awkward 13-year-old son of Brian (Greg Kinnear), who is a struggling actor, and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), whose psychotherapy practice pays the bills. When Brian’s father dies, the family moves into his building in Brooklyn; they live on the second floor, over a dressmaker’s shop on the first. Chilean Leonor (Paulina Garcia) is the tenant, and she also has a 13-year-old son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who has a striking Brooklyn accent and is as extroverted and jocular as Jake is reserved and introverted. When they meet after the funeral, Jake and Tony become fast and best friends. They initially bond over video games, but then Tony, who aspires to be an actor, is immensely impressed with Jake’s artistic abilities, and Jake is drawn into Tony’s social life, if tentatively. They skateboard together, take acting lessons together and hang out constantly. They are both at the age just before brooding, self-aware adolescence, when things like cliques, class and status have yet to be understood.

Meanwhile, Brian and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) discover that their father was charging Leonor an incredibly low rent, low in general, but even lower in the context of the gentrifying neighborhood. In need of money, they triple Leonor’s rent. Brian is racked by guilt, not only because of Jake and Tony’s friendship but because Leonor tells him that his father and her were close, much closer than he was with his children, and would have wanted her to pay what she could. In order to get their parents to work something out, Jake and Tony refuse to speak to them, which, as most teenage manipulations do, doesn’t help matters. Things don’t go the way that most films would go, in that the ending is neither happy nor tragic, but recognizably bittersweet.

While the film is quiet, the emotions are intense, especially if you can identify with the boys, who are singular creations but also types we’ve all known – or been. While the adults are portrayed by major actors – Kinnear the most famous to film audiences, Ehle a major theater star, and Garcia one of the greatest actors in Spanish language cinema – but they are really support for the two boys, both astonishingly talented. Taplitz seems more studied in his oddities, but he is also remarkably at ease in difficult emotional scenes. Barbieri is so natural that it’s hard to believe he’s acting, let alone aware he’s being filmed. He has a scene in an acting class, in which he’s mimicking his teacher, that is thrilling.

The adults are great, too, but they aren’t given as much to do that is interesting. Kinnear is always just fine, but Ehle and particularly Garcia are among the world’s best actresses, and I was hoping for a bit more excitement from them and their roles. But that’s not what Sachs does. He gives us reality, which isn’t always the most exciting thing to watch, even if it’s deeply meaningful.

Little Men

Directed by Ira Sachs

Written by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias

Starring Theo Taplitz, Michael Barbieri and Greg Kinnear

Rated PG

Opens at Landmark Ken Sept. 9

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