Moonlight

Saw Moonlight.  It was really good.  Oscar worthy!  It's about a black man growing up in Miami, coming to terms with himself and his sexuality.  He's raised by a single mother astoundingly played by Naomie Harris who slides into addiction as the film goes on.  The film is split into three parts: boyhood adolescence and adulthood.  As a child, the other children can sense something gentle about the boy, something different.  He's supported by a surprisingly tender drug dealer who is the closest thing to a stable family that he has.  There's a heartbreaking scene where the boy comes home and softly asks the dealer "what does faggot mean?"  Later on, as a teenager, he must fend for himself and understand himself.  A first boyfriend makes things more clear but also more difficult.  As an adult, he has become an enforcer in the drug gang, huge, scary, and troubled.

The film has a spacey quality to it, drawing inspiration from Wong Kar-wai's semi-improvised films.  Here there's a sadness about the film that gives way to a very menacing ambiguity as the character grows up.  It is increasingly unimaginable that he will accept himself and settle down with a husband or a boyfriend.  He is almost totally withdrawn and we don't know what lurks beneath that hard exterior.  Is he angry or depressed?  Stoic or vengeful?

The film is difficult, showing the perspective of a marginalized minority within a marginalized minority.  The boy is forced to hide and suppress everything tender or vulnerable about himself in order to survive.  We'd like to dream of education, or sports, or the arts giving this boy a way out, a way to be himself, but the situation seems hopeless.  He must choose between being true to himself and being around his family, his home.  He'd have to be made of steel to make it out unscathed and so steel he becomes.

I was very moved by the movie.  It's up my alley of course and I don't know how it would hit a straight audience.  There's a profound sense of waste about this movie.  This poor boy has had to suffer so much and carry that suffering around with him as an adult as it drives him crazy for no reason.  No reason at all.