The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Barry Jenkins · a film · 2016 · about 111 minutes · from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney · in English
Mode
Coming-of-age drama of the American neighbourhood given the lyric form of art cinema; triptych, love story and portrait in one
Mythos
The son who becomes the father; a baptism in the sea; three names, each given by others, the last by the beloved
Phase
One life in three chapters, boyhood, adolescence and early adulthood, from a lesson in the sea to a night in a kitchen
Presentation
Feature film in colour, widescreen, about 111 minutes, in English; three chapters titled “i. Little”, “ii. Chiron” and “iii. Black”, each played by a different actor; James Laxton’s photography, Nicholas Britell’s score, editing by Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon
Register
Quiet and close: faces at the centre of the frame and almost meeting the lens, light that is never neutral on dark skin, sound withdrawn at the moments of greatest feeling
Scale
One man at three ages, a mother, a surrogate father and mother, a friend; a neighbourhood, a school, a city in the next state
Governing Proposition
A boy in Liberty City, Miami, is called Little, then Chiron, then Black, and three actors play him across three chapters with the years between them left unshown. The wager of the film is that a self is made in the gaps, by what happened offscreen; that the armour a boy builds against the world is a costume of the man who first sheltered him; and that the love and the harm in his life came from the same hands, while the tenderness under the armour waits, unspent, for the one person who can see through it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Moonlight was written and directed by Barry Jenkins from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, his unproduced theatre piece In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It was produced by Plan B, by Adele Romanski, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, photographed by James Laxton, edited by Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon, and scored by Nicholas Britell. It was first shown at Telluride in September 2016 and opened in the United States through A24 in October. It runs about 111 minutes, in colour and widescreen, and only one cut exists.
It is built in three chapters, each titled with the name its protagonist is called by at that age: “i. Little”, “ii. Chiron”, “iii. Black”. Three actors play him, Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes, and three play Kevin, his friend, Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome and André Holland. Naomie Harris plays his mother, Paula, in all three. Mahershala Ali plays Juan, and Janelle Monáe plays Teresa. The first two chapters are set in Liberty City, Miami; the third moves to Atlanta and then back to Miami.
Between the chapters years pass, and the film does not show them. The gap is marked only by the change of actor: a different face, a different body, the same eyes and the same stoop. The viewer has to recognise the boy across bodies that share almost nothing else, and the film is built so that this act of recognition, made twice by the audience, is made at last by a character. Its title is the image from a story Juan tells the boy, of being told that in moonlight black boys look blue; the film ends on that image.
Movement II
A small boy whom others call Little is taken up by Juan, who deals drugs in the neighbourhood, and fed at Teresa’s table. Juan takes him to the sea and teaches him to float, his hand under the boy’s head, the camera low in the water as the waves lift them both. It is the first summit of the film and its baptism: a father found, in water, by a boy who has none.
At dinner the boy asks a question that has been thrown at him: “What’s a faggot?” Then he asks whether Juan sells drugs, and Juan bows his head. The man who taught him to swim is the man who sells his mother crack. The love and the harm come from the same hands, and the film puts that truth in a single exchange at a kitchen table and then lets it stand.
Paula loves her son and is losing herself. In a hallway lit pink she screams, and the sound is withdrawn, so that the scream is silent and the light is the only thing that rises. Light that is never neutral, sound taken away where feeling is strongest: the rule of the whole film is set here. The chapter ends with the boy still guarded, holding what he has been taught by the people who shelter and wound him.
Movement III
Chiron is a thin adolescent at school, bullied by Terrel, with his mother taking his money. Juan’s death has fallen between the chapters, unshown. Kevin, the friend from boyhood, is still near him. The school plot runs on familiar machinery, a bully and his taunts, and it is flat between the scenes that rise from it.
One night Chiron goes to the beach, and Kevin is there. They sit in blue light and wind, the sound of the waves held over their talk, and Kevin touches him. Desire between them is enacted once, without a name, and the film gives that one night the weight of a life. Nothing in the scene is stated; everything is in the light, the wind and the two faces.
The next day Terrel makes Kevin hit him in the schoolyard, and Kevin does. Afterwards Chiron plunges his face into ice water. Then he walks into a classroom and breaks a chair over Terrel, in slow motion, through the door. The two halves of one betrayal are complete, and the chair is the hinge into the third self. He is arrested; the juvenile sentence, like Juan’s death, falls in the gap the film does not show.
Movement IV
The third chapter opens in Atlanta on a man the viewer must work to recognise: muscled, silent, a dealer with a gold grill on his teeth and a car with a crown on its dashboard. He is called Black, the name Kevin gave him. He has become Juan: his look, the crown in his car, his trade. The armour he has built is a costume of the man who first sheltered him and first harmed him, and he wears it so completely that the thin boy is nowhere in it.
He wakes from a dream, hard cut, alone. The withheld decade is there in the body Trevante Rhodes gives him, and in a stillness that does not break. The film shows none of the years between, and it does not need to: what it shows is what has persisted, a face that keeps the same eyes over a different man, and a tenderness unspent for a decade.
He visits Paula in rehab, and she puts into words what the film had shown. It is a moving scene, and the one place where the film speaks what it had kept unspoken. Then he drives back to Miami, to Kevin.
Movement V
Kevin cooks in a diner. Black comes in, and takes the gold grill out of his mouth. Kevin cooks him a meal and serves it to him, and “Hello Stranger” plays on the jukebox. Little is said; a whole film’s longing is held in glances across a counter. Kevin asks, in substance, who he is now, and the question is the one the film has asked of the viewer at each chapter. The armour is seen through by the one person who knew the boy inside it.
At Kevin’s apartment Black tells him that no one else has touched him, since that night on the beach. Kevin holds his head. The gesture returns to the first chapter: Juan’s hand under a boy’s head in the sea. The film does not say what the two men will be after this, or whether the reunion is love returned or only recognised. It ends on the recognition.
The last image is Little on a beach at night, in blue light, turning to look at the camera. The boy has been there all along. Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with awards for its adapted screenplay and for Mahershala Ali, and it has held its place in screenings, in teaching, on home video and streaming, since. What it made is a form: three bodies for one life, the years between them left dark, and one face turned toward the one who sees it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little idle. The triptych is the argument: take any chapter away and the film loses one of the three selves whose discontinuity is its subject. In the first, the swimming lesson, the dinner at which the boy asks what a word means and then whether Juan sells drugs, and Paula’s silent scream in a pink-lit hallway each bear weight: the father found, the word named, the father unmasked as the source of the mother’s ruin. In the second, the night on the beach and the beating Kevin is made to deliver are two halves of one betrayal, and the chair is the hinge into the third self. What gives: Terrel is a schematic bully, and the rehab visit states what the film had shown.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a Black boy in a poor neighbourhood is taught, by everyone who hurts or loves him, to make his body a fortress, and the armour he builds is a costume of the man who first sheltered him; tenderness survives under it, unspent for a decade. A second truth, given in image: the love and the harm come from the same hands. Juan teaches the boy to swim and sells his mother crack; Paula loves him and takes his money; Kevin loves him and hits him. A third: desire between men is enacted once and buried, and that night carries a life’s weight. Held below the top because the order that makes the armour, school, police and the drug economy, is shown as weather more than anatomised.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation recurs, in a quiet register. The swimming lesson, the camera low in the water as Juan holds the boy’s head and the sea lifts them both, is the first summit and the film’s baptism. Paula’s scream in the corridor, the sound withdrawn and the light turned pink, rises to dread. The night beach, two boys in blue light and wind with the waves held over their talk. The chair through the classroom door, in slow motion. Then the diner, where a whole film’s longing is compressed into glances across a counter, and the last image of a boy on a beach at night, turning to look at the camera. Held below the top because the height is of intimacy, seldom of grandeur, and the school plot of the second chapter is flat between its summits.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth is built, not only evoked, but in a narrow span. The load-bearing pattern is the son who becomes the father: Black in Atlanta wears Juan’s look, drives a car with a crown on its dashboard, keeps his trade, and puts on the armour of the man who was both shelter and source of harm. The boy is baptised in the sea by that father, and the film returns to water at each crisis: ice water for a beaten face, the beach where Kevin touches him, the sea outside the diner’s city. The three names are three selves, each given by others, the last by the beloved, so the identity forged as armour carries the trace of love. Held below the gate because the sacred and the communal are absent and the archetype stays within one life.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the American neighbourhood film of the 1990s, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, with its dealers, absent fathers and violence; and the art cinema of mood and ellipsis of Wong Kar-wai and Claire Denis, whose In the Mood for Love (8.7) and Beau Travail (8.4) stand on this desk. The turn is real: the matter of the neighbourhood film given the lyric form of the art film, its violence kept largely offscreen, its protagonist a gay Black boy whose story is a love story. The stake was considerable for a director whose one earlier feature, of 2008, was made for almost nothing. Held below the gate because each half walks a proven path: the manner is Wong’s and Denis’s, and the matter had precedents in independent queer cinema.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a self is made in the gaps. The three-actor triptych is the instrument. The film never shows the years between chapters, Juan’s death, the juvenile sentence, a thin boy remade as a muscled dealer, and the viewer must recognise Chiron across bodies that share little but the eyes and the stoop; that act of recognition is what Kevin performs in the diner. Told as one continuous life with one actor ageing, the knowledge would become a story of change; told this way it is a story of what persists. Faces held at the centre of the frame, looking almost into the lens, put the viewer where the one person who sees him stands. Held below the top where the second chapter leans on school-drama scaffolding.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Mostly forecast, and the figure says so. Ten years have brought sustained attention: readings of the film as a study of Black masculinity, as queer cinema, as a film of addiction and of Miami, of its colour and its debt to Wong, and of the triptych as a theory of identity. The questions are genuinely open: what Black has been for ten years, what he and Kevin will be after the last scene, whether the reunion is love returned or only recognised, what Juan knew. The form yields on return, in the rhymes across chapters: water, the crown, three looks into the camera, three voices for Kevin. Against this, the span is a decade, and part of the return is to texture and mood. A work this young can show little on this axis yet.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation: it carried art-cinema form into a subject American film had treated only in genre, and showed that a queer Black coming-of-age story in the vernacular of the neighbourhood film could be told as lyric. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor, and wide critical consensus at release. Its manner, saturated colour on dark skin, a slowed and pitched-down score, faces in close frontal framing, is widely seen in the American independent and streaming drama that followed, which is noted as breadth and weighed lightly, since part of that manner is Wong’s and Denis’s. Ten years of reach is short, and part of it is prize.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across ten years from 2016. Form: the film survives whole, in its only cut, digital in origin, with nothing lost or altered. Presence: wide for its age, in a theatrical release and a re-release after the Academy Awards, continuous availability on home video and streaming, teaching in film courses, and a standing that has held since release. Fabric: the surface of the third chapter is fixed to its moment, its phones and cars and the Atlanta trap music and dress of the mid-2010s, though the first two chapters are set earlier and read as period. Survival is credited for what a decade has shown, and a decade shows little; the prize is presence, not proof of permanence. The gate is not met.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The making bears weight in most departments. James Laxton’s photography gives Black skin blue, violet and amber in light that is never neutral, circles the actors in the opening and the schoolyard, and holds still where the feeling holds. Nicholas Britell’s score, chamber strings slowed and pitched down in the manner of chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, makes the soundtrack the protagonist’s interior. The editing makes the chapter breaks and the withheld years. Mahershala Ali’s Juan lives in a handful of scenes, Naomie Harris’s Paula across three chapters, and Trevante Rhodes holds a decade of suppression until the diner. The costs weigh: the circling camera sometimes signals style more than it carries meaning, the Terrel plot is thinly written, and Janelle Monáe’s Teresa has little to do after the first chapter.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the schoolyard and the slow-motion chair of the second chapter, and the near silence of the diner in the third. One law governs both: what is felt cannot be shown, and the body becomes what others make of it; the chair is the armour forged, the diner the armour seen through. The law holds across Juan’s tenderness and his trade, Paula’s love and her addiction, Kevin’s affection and his blow, and the film’s refusal to judge any of them. Colour, score and framing obey it: sound withdraws at the moments of greatest feeling, and light turns unnatural where the inner life is strongest. The range is real without being wide in kind. The strain: the rehab scene speaks what the law kept unspoken, and the Terrel plot runs on genre machinery.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Consciousness, one man’s across three ages, held from inside through the form; the family, a mother in addiction and a surrogate father and mother; sexuality, desire and its suppression; the drug economy, as livelihood, as a father’s trade and then the son’s; school and its violence; the law, as arrest, juvenile sentence and prison, almost wholly offscreen; a neighbourhood, Liberty City; labour, in Kevin’s kitchen. They are joined through the one life: the drug trade is the father, the mother’s ruin and the son’s armour at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and history are absent beyond implication, the sacred appears only as the shadow of a baptism, and the community is seen only through the few who touch Chiron. A low figure here describes the form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Unconcealment at 8.6. A triptych in which a self is made in the years the film does not show, so that the viewer’s recognition of one man across three bodies becomes the lover’s; and a disclosure that holds beyond the film, that the armour of masculinity is a costume of the wounding protector and that love and harm come from the same hands.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: consciousness, the family, desire, the drug economy, school and the law are held through one life, while the state, history, the sacred and the wider community are absent beyond implication. Above it, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 7.9, the return and the survival of a decade, which can show little yet.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.2, fall three tenths short, The Swerve at 8.1 four tenths short, and The Imperishable at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.9, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Moonlight as released, the theatrical cut of about 111 minutes, in colour and widescreen, from the lesson in the sea to the boy on the beach at night: written and directed by Barry Jenkins from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, produced by Plan B, photographed by James Laxton, edited by Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon, with music by Nicholas Britell; first shown at Telluride in September 2016 and released in the United States by A24 in October 2016. Only one cut exists, and it is the unit. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line of dialogue is quoted, held to the word; other speech is given in substance. McCraney’s unproduced theatre piece is named as the source and is not part of the work. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the budget, the length of the shoot, locations beyond Liberty City, the length of each chapter, shot counts and the share of dialogue, the director’s own account of his models, the firsts claimed for the Best Picture award, and placings in critics’ polls.