But in Jenkins’ and Ali’s sterling interpretation of the character, he’s also filled with tenderness and insight he knows enough about who he is to know what he can mean, and does mean, to Chiron. There’s no question that he’s capable of violence. Yet like most everyone we meet in Moonlight, Juan transcends easy stereotype. What we’ve learned prior to their encounter, however, is that Juan is also an intimidating drug dealer, and another movie would have us waiting for the inevitable moment in which Chiron sees this man behaving like the bastard he must certainly be. Not long into Moonlight, Juan, a well-known neighborhood fixture, calms the boy after he’s been terrorized by classmates, getting him some food and allowing him to spend the night in the spacious suburban home he shares with girlfriend Teresa (a gentle, bighearted Janelle Monáe). In castmates Mahershala Ali (Chiron’s savior Juan in the film’s first third) and Naomie Harris (Chiron’s mother Paula in all three segments), you’re also given a glimpse of everything Chiron is both aching for and frightened of. ![]() Jenkins provides visual motifs that connect Chiron as he ages – principally long closeups of the child/man gazing directly into the camera – yet the actors’ transcendent understanding of the role ensures that you can always sense the wary, frightened child inside the teen, and the lost, affection-starved teen inside the adult. Playing this bullied, confused, lonely kid who’s too emotionally constricted to verbalize nearly anything he’s feeling, Hibbert melds into Sanders, and Sanders into Rhodes, with staggeringly naturalistic precision (and, according to a Jenkins interview in Film Comment, without the performers seeing one another’s work during dailies). But one of the many miracles of Jenkins’ offering is that you could easily be fooled into thinking the filmmaker took six or seven years off in between each of the film’s three acts and just let Chiron’s initial portrayer age naturally. Famously, Ellar Coltrane played Boyhood’s central character through the entirety of that movie’s 12-year span, while Moonlight has three separate performers – Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes – assigned to its lead. ![]() On its surface, the film bears a passing resemblance to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, following our protagonist Chiron through three distinct periods in his life: the grade-school Chiron’s introduction to, and tentative rapport with, an unexpected father figure the teenage Chiron’s first stirrings of romantic love followed by a horrifying betrayal and the adult Chiron’s reunions with a struggling family member and a long-lost friend. Given how thrillingly, unusually specific its point-of-view is, Moonlight’s also being extraordinarily well-acted, -written, and -produced is practically a bonus. Yet you might also find it impossible to look away Jenkins’ cinematic triptych on the experiences of a young, gay, black male growing up in lower-middle-class Miami elicits the kind of empathetic fascination you occasionally derive from a first-rate memoir, and only rarely from a movie. Writer/director Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age drama Moonlight feels so personal, so revealing, that it sometimes seems as though you shouldn’t even be watching it.
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