Movie Review: "If Beale Street Could Talk" Finds True Love in a Tragedy

The director of Moonlight returns with a dreamy, 1970s love story that has present day resonance.

Usually, when you watch a movie by a great director, you say you love it. When you watch a Barry Jenkins movie, with his reliance on adoring first-person frame-ups, you’re the one who feels loved.

In Moonlight and now If Beale Street Could Talk, he commands his stars to slowly lift their eyes to the camera, stare right down the lens, and peer into your gosh darn soul.

Of course, his characters aren’t really looking at us; they’re looking at one another, and we’re simply seeing through the recipients’ eyes. It’s more Being John Malkovich than a breaking of the fourth wall. There are probably subtler ways to evoke empathy than by literally putting the audience in the characters’ shoes, but as far as cinematic magic tricks go, it’s a good one, and as far as stories worthy of our empathy go, the tale at the heart of If Beale Street Could Talk is a hugely significant one.

It’s based on legendary activist and poet James Baldwin’s book of the same name. (Jenkins adapted the script.) It doesn’t take place on Beale Street in New Orleans, exactly; as an opening scrawl informs us, there are many streets across America like Beale, where Baldwin’s father was raised, and many stories like this one. And so, it’s set in Harlem (kinda like how the film Margaret is actually about a girl named Lisa).

The yarn begins in the 1970s, with 18-year-old Tish (KiKi Layne) telling her incarcerated boyfriend Fonny (Stephan James) that he’s gonna be a daddy. Later that night, she breaks the news to her mother (Regina King), father (Colman Domingo) and sister (Teyonah Parris), who, given the circumstances, take the information pretty well. They invite over Fonny’s family, to spread the news. Their response is, umm, less elated.

As the two families reckon with Tish’s announcement, Jenkins flashes back to key moments in hers and Fonny’s courtship, eventually leading up to the circumstance that saw him end up behind bars. It involves a run-in with a racist cop and an arrest for rape, though the picture goes to great lengths to prove that Alonzo couldn’t have committed the crime, without disputing the core truth behind the complaint. Someone must have attacked Puerto Rican immigrant Victoria (Emily Rios), but since she fled back to her home country, a trial to clear Fonny’s name keeps getting postponed. Tish’s delivery date gets ever closer. And we learn how due process isn’t always applied to black men.

Baldwin’s texts (brought to life by Samuel L. Jackson in the must-see documentary I Am Not Your Negro) are not backward in coming forward, and the points made by If Beale Street Could Talk are heavily underlined and not necessarily presented for dispute. Not that you would have much reason to dispute them. As BlacKkKlansman similarly stressed, the legacy of institutionalised racism remains in the US and beyond. Here, Baldwin’s prose, bolstered by Jenkins, gives the actors plenty to chew on, particularly King, as she seeks out justice for her son-in-law; James, as he reckons with the prospect of a life lost in prison; and one-scene-wonder Brian Tyree Henry, as a friend of Fonny’s and a former convict with trauma to spare.

Yet Jenkins—aided by the swirling score of Nicholas Britell, the woozy camerawork of James Laxton and the tender lead turn by KiKi Layne—is primarily telling a love story. That’s what bleeds from the screen most. If Beale Street Could Talk punctures appropriately, but it’s filled with loving gazes (and arriving on Valentine's Day) for a reason.

4.5/5

In Australian cinemas 14 February. Rated MA15+ for strong coarse language.