Well, of course Moonlight won the Academy Award. Who’s kidding whom in the year following the dreadful scandal known as #OscarsSoWhite? Sure, it looked like La La Land had it sewn up, so much so that no one batted an eye when it was mistakenly awarded Best Picture for two minutes at the jaw-dropping close of this year’s ceremony. But La La Land only got its chance to become the frontrunner because the movie everybody in Hollywood thought would be the unstoppable awards behemoth, a slave-revolt epic called The Birth of a Nation written by, directed, and starring the African-American actor Nate Parker, ran afoul of the news that Parker had once been tried and acquitted for raping a woman who later committed suicide.
Even as La La Land racked up early awards, it began to fall victim to the “hot take” school—that breed of pop-culture writers who wag their collective finger at any work that does not serve and promote the most up-to-date leftist shibboleths. After receiving universal praise upon its initial release for its aesthetic daring, La La Land later found itself under attack as a retrogressive representation of white privilege, especially offensive because its protagonist is a Caucasian committed to saving classical jazz. How dare he be so paternalistic? How. Dare. He.
Other notable nominees were deemed similarly bereft of the proper multiculturalism. Manchester by the Sea is about a New England fishing town, and you don’t get diversity credit these days for having supporting characters with Portuguese surnames, even if they are working class. Hell or High Water? Its hero, a Texas Ranger, spends the entire movie making Native-American jokes about his Native-American partner. Hacksaw Ridge was directed by Mel Gibson, so please. Even the crowd-pleasing Hidden Figures, the true story of three African-American women working in the space program in the early 1960s, was put through the wringer because it has a white director and features a scene in which a fictional white character destroys a segregated-bathrooms sign. This was deemed an offensive example of the so-called “white savior” trope.
Set against them all was Moonlight. We’re talking about a movie about a downtrodden kid named Chiron whose mother is an addict and whose classmates chase him daily and later beat him senseless for being gay. He finds slight refuge in the company of two people—and even they do him terrible damage. One is a kind and fatherly man who takes Chiron under his wing but also runs the drug trade selling the boy’s mother the crack that is destroying her. The other is a classmate who shares the same gay urges he does but betrays him in order to hide his own same-sex inclinations from the abusive bullies who set upon Chiron.
This summarizes the first two-thirds of Moonlight, and it’s powerful, painful stuff. The cowriter and director, Barry Jenkins, working from an unproduced play by his collaborator Tarell Alvin McCraney, has a remarkable eye and delicate tone. The movie is unexpectedly beautiful even when its settings—in the hardscrabble Miami neighborhood of Liberty City—are anything but.
The movie falls apart in its last third, when we encounter Chiron fully grown. It’s one thing to center a movie around a child so battered by life that he is practically mute; it’s quite another to force us to contemplate that same sullen near-mute person as an adult. Moonlight‘s dramatic flaw is that Chiron is a bore; we are made to feel sorry for him but we have no reason to like, admire, or care about him. Jenkins and McCraney have both said that the story derives, in part, from their own experiences with drug-addicted mothers; but their own life stories suggest they have sold their own characters short. They didn’t end up in Chiron’s condition. They ended up with Oscars in their hands. That’s a more interesting story than the one they tell here.
Still, they may have understood their ultimate audience’s needs by choosing to keep Chiron sullen, mute, and lost throughout. Moonlight is a story about a sad, abused, unloved, poor, black, gay person. The fact that when it is not depressing to watch it gets very, verrry slow is beside the point. Moonlight is so perfectly constructed to avoid being the subject of a Slate pitch that the only possible hot take on the movie would have to come from Richard Spencer.
So, yes, we should have known Moonlight would win—even when La La Land seemed to have won during those strange two minutes at the end of the broadcast. Moonlight has proved itself to be, literally, beyond criticism. Indeed, it scored 99 out of 100 on Metacritic, meaning that it did not receive a single negative review.
Hey, not even this piece is negative! It’s two-thirds positive! Even I know when to shut up.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
