Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins
I’d been hesitant to see Moonlight. Although I knew it would be a worthy movie I just wasn’t sure if I had the capacity to watch it after a week of work … escapism is so much more alluring when you are exhausted on a Friday night.
Well, Moonlight is definitely worthy and it is also completely engrossing. The cinematography is glorious, the acting is superb and the script is full of the cliché-less surprises in approach to a subject that make any movie memorable. Down with stereotypes!
Okay, it is about a black ghetto community in the States, but it is more about being human and that thing we call humanity. It dwells on the touch of innocent lips and the kindness of strangers, along with the more brutal aspects of life. It is as much about having your teeth shattered by a kick to the head at school as it is about putting fresh sheets on a bed for a troubled child.
Moonlight tracks the growing-up of a little boy to manhood. It presents how a boy is shaped and made by the people he meets along the way and how he can choose what type of man he wishes to grow into from the best of the (in this case, somewhat limited) options presented to him in his universe.
This is a movie that makes you project beyond ‘The End’. It will make you hope that our young man and his lover will one day stroll down the beach on which they first made love, hand-in-hand in hand with their child, their life decisions offering that child more options than they were given.