If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins) (Patreon)

Didn't relish being one of the few dissenting voices on Moonlight—a film I saw twice, hoping to come around—but feel more sanguine about this slightly less heretical response, which is rooted mostly in standard literary-adaptation issues. Devising a visual analogue to Baldwin's supremely elegant prose style represents an almost insurmountable challenge, and Beale Street truly sings when Jenkins simply has his actors perform the book's dialogue with hushed authority. Everything else seems to fall away as Fonny and Daniel discuss their shared feeling of powerlessness, or as Joseph persuades Frank that helping their children, whose lives are being wrongfully destroyed, justifies any petty criminal acts that securing the necessary money might require. (Regina King sweeping the critics' awards while Colman Domingo gets completely ignored speaks to how easily seduced most people are, when judging performances, by emotional volume level.) Less successful, to my mind, is the film's handling of the open hostility—nay, viciousness—that every female relative of Fonny's directs at Tish; without Baldwin's words ("Between the mother's prayers, which were more like curses, and the sisters' tears, which were more like orgasms, Fonny didn't stand a chance") deftly modulating the tone, this early confrontation threatens to unbalance the movie, overwhelming the delicacy of the romantic flashbacks surrounding it. And Jenkins leans very hard on voiceover narration, which as usual just makes me wish that I were reading the source material instead. Lovely in isolated bits and pieces, but unsatisfying in its overall shape, like the vast majority of movies made from novels. Look at its anodyne final shot, and then read Baldwin's lacerating final paragraph:

Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.