We are astonishingly low in James Baldwin film adaptations. The acclaimed novelist and activist, one of the great writers of the 20th-century and a major voice in Western race relations, has only been brought to the screen four times. One of those was a documentary. If Beale Street Could Talk, adapted and directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, will hopefully be the opening of a floodgate: if you’re looking for his last movie’s grit and murk, you may not find it here, but what you will find is a movie of drab circumstances made technicolor. If Beale Street Could Talk is the story of two young lovers, Tish and Fonny, who get engaged and conceive a baby. Tish’s family – the Rivers – supports the union and the child, but Fonny’s is far less forgiving: his evangelical mother curses the entire thing. The big complicating factor in all this is that Fonny is not around to help. He’s been incarcerated after being accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman. The facts don’t add up and all signs point to the perpetrator being a racist NYPD cop, but it falls on the struggling families to prove his innocence. The film, like the book, is a paean to the power of family and to the way society treats young black men as people who are guilty until proven innocent. It’s also a beautiful love letter to a period in New York full of Nina Simone, Italian delis and beautiful knitwear. Every shot is masterful, every character fully realised and there are moments of real warmth and comedy mixed in with the films grimmest scenes. It lacks the dark palette and dense melancholy of Moonlight, and that’s no bad thing.
But what the film deserves to be praised for – and awards season seems to suggest I’m not wrong in saying this – is a cast of women who knock it out of the park. While KiKi Layne’s Tish sometimes feels a bit unnatural in the film’s opening scenes, it’s Regina King as her mother and Teyonah Parris as her sister that provide the film with its strongest performances. Regina King has, thankfully, had a renaissance on TV before getting to show her full skill in this film, so it’s safe to say this is the crest of a wave: King is so entirely herself on screen, the moment the camera falls on her there’s not an inch of her being kept back. When she walks into a restaurant in Puerto Rico dressed up like Sarah Vaughan but still clearly a beaten down housewife, you can’t deny that the woman is one of the most under-sung actresses out there. Her confrontation with the Puerto Rican woman who accused her son-in-law is the film’s best scene, and in a film of subplots branching off the main family unit, King’s is easily the strongest and most fleshed out. But for me the real star is Teyonah Parris, who I truly feel is not the recipient of the kind of praise she deserves. Whereas Regina brings an earthiness to the heightened poetry of Baldwin and Jenkins, Parris is a constant crack of a whip. She’s, in the most literal sense of the term, pure fire as Ernestine, Tish’s elder sister.
You can feel how affected her dialogue is, and how slight her part could be in the hands of another actress, and she takes both and runs through it with the most astonishing chutzpah. She’s been doing it for years: in Chi-raq, in Dear White People, even back in her time on Mad Men. She serves the kind of performance that makes me yearn for someone to give her another leading role, the kind that makes her as ubiquitous as Lupita Nyong'o or Tessa Thompson. Beale Street is the kind of ensemble piece we've been lacking of recent: a love story that also gives the entire Rivers family time to spread out and explore the issues at the centre of the piece. It's a film of ambiguities, which at times feels powerful and at time feels annoyingly opaque: Brian Tyree Henry's monologue about racism in prison is all the more powerful for the gaps, while the film's closing moments, in which a note from father to son is not explained, just feel like deliberate obfuscation. It's a subtle, twisty, seething film with the double-heartbeat of stellar performances and a focus on the things we do for family. You should see it: fall in love, break your heart and think about what it leaves you saying about the ever-crucial issues at its heart.
Read more:
Why Moonlight winning Best Picture may be an Oscars turning point