Beginner’s Guide: Barry Jenkins, Director 

When Barry Jenkins makes a movie, he composes an elegy for the sweet life that almost happens. Refusing to hammer the audience with hyperbole or insincerity, the particulars of that unrealized future fall far outside the realm of pie-in-the-sky fantasies. In other words, instead of fame or riches or prestige, these characters ache for basic comforts: the togetherness of family, the warmth of familiar love, and the freedom to enjoy life without fear of premature death. 

Such reasonable circumstances almost see light, but in these films, three of them thus far, even a person’s most realistic dreams dangle inches out of reach. Yet, despite every move the characters make to gain an inkling of satisfaction, happiness vanishes like a hazy desert mirage. Looking at another filmmaker’s body of work, the devotion to a thematic foundation often generates criticism of narrowness and predictability, but in watching Jenkins’ pictures, we see how the director approaches these matters from a new vantage point every time. 

Moonlight’s triptych of narrative portraits reveals how homophobia, racism, and poverty sentence even young children to a life anchored with incessant struggle. In the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, the director examines how the justice system either over-punishes inmates or jails innocent black men, all the while showing how that torture extends to the families who agonize for their loved ones’ release. And Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins’ first full length release, chronicles two individuals who harbor soulmate-caliber similarities, but never find common political ground in the fast-gentrifying San Francisco they both love. 

Audiences find no paint-by-numbers, plot-driven storytelling here. The director’s goal as a storyteller centers on deep immersion and sheer candor, and he succeeds at it with images and scenarios that stew inside the brain long after the end credits ascend. Sinking deeper into the lives of Jenkins’ rich characters, we find ourselves celebrating while we lament and reconstructing hope while we brace for the worst.

If Beale Street Could Talk, 2018 

With the crane shot that opens this film, the scene unveils a world tinged with a burnt yellow, a colorscape that conjures images of disco, Jimmy Carter, and the Pet Rock. Our story unfolds in the Seventies, a fact we realize within the first few seconds. But the umber light and canary-bright wardrobe represent only one choice that places us in a distinct setting. Every move the director makes feels purposeful, as if he takes us by the hand while we watch Tish and Fonny fall deeper in love between attempts to deflect the recurring bigotry that serves as the wallpaper of their lives. To get concrete, Jenkins walks alongside us as we watch the characters feign optimism that justice exists for a young black man imprisoned for a crime he never committed.

Even in their happiest moments, which the couple consciously and actively engineers, a vicious turmoil stirs behind them. And that lingering dread happens because the director stays in front of us, playing the role of guide, never allowing the audience to forget that the odds remain impossibly stacked against our protagonists. As these conflicts swirl together and make life that much more tumultuous, the couple anticipate the birth of their first child. The pending baby creates apprehensiveness and joy, but more than anything, its arrival intensifies the mission to prove Fonny’s innocence and remove him from prison.

No question Barry Jenkins reached auteur status when he finished If Beale Street Could Talk. After all, his cinematic signatures permeate every turn, motifs that remain distinctive but continue evolving with each feature. But he refuses to show off his directorial trademarks in the manner of a filmmaker such as Lars von Trier who stops just short of jumping into the frame himself. For this filmmaker, authorship means exploration of character. In his third movie, Tish and Fonny and their families shine on the stage, but James Baldwin, the author of the source novel, also steps into the light. Barry Jenkins never hides who owned this title’s byline first. From quoting lines from the novel to voice over narration that adds more dimension to the characters, he celebrates the writer who inspires him.

Moonlight, 2016 

For boys, growing up so often comes with a list of toxic demands, misguided expectations that inflict horrendous damage on individuals of all genders. That misogynistic demon chases our protagonist Chiron throughout Moonlight. As an elementary school youngster, the child senses hints of his sexuality, which he represses as he grows older. Once adulthood hits, Chiron fears the repercussions of his born nature so much that he lives under a fabricated, 180-degree reversed persona. All the while, the director shows us the lasting, positive impact a little tenderness makes for boys who society otherwise conditions to be tough, if not flat-out cruel to all with whom they interact. That gentility happens in the most profound way with a scene shot in the Atlantic Ocean.

To describe the swimming lesson scene as a mere Oscar clip creates a major disservice. After all, the moment showcases one of the most poetic moments in 21st Century American cinema. Those few moments on screen reveal the messiness of love, how tangled and inarticulate our affections for one another become, and how no two people share an unsullied relationship. Here we see Juan, an ipso facto father figure, balance a boy’s planked body above turbulent water. The child feels scared but safe under Juan’s protection, and we forget, for a moment, that the man who teaches him not to fear the water makes a living selling illicit substances, some of which feed Chiron’s mother’s crippling addiction. The water sloshes against the camera lens, and the frame rocks in a boat-like motion, placing the audience inside a transcendent moment. We think about these instances in our own lives, those perfect memories made possible by imperfect people.    

A remarkable story almost always examines the evolution of a character, and that commandment happens again and again in this film. Jenkins made three cohesive portraits where the same character transitions to a different station each time—shy child to depressed teenager to mask-wearing adult. In Moonlight, the change element unfolds as a weapon of self-defense. In an interview with Pitchfork, the director explained the direness of Chiron’s choices very clearly, “sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference between life and death.” In this regard, change remains the film’s narrative center, but the need for it to happen on the societal level serves as a call to action.

Medicine for Melancholy, 2008

We open on a man, wearing hip but rumpled clothing, as if he slept in the outfit. He squirts a dab of toothpaste on his finger. Brushing his teeth without the proper tools shows the audience the man woke up in a place not his own. Then a woman enters, who performs the same make-do hygienic routine. It becomes clear this house belongs to neither character. The uncomfortable air between the two of them, alongside the crushed beer cans spilling over the trash can lips, lets us know what happened the night before. In this way, Jenkins refuses to engage in hold-your-hand exposition, always hanging tight to the age-old storytelling commandment of showing instead of telling.

While the politics of a one-night stand seems like a one-dimensional conflict at a glance, the tryst serves as a launching pad for a film about a conversation. That talk focuses on San Francisco, and what happens when a city pushes out working class residents to make room for the wealthy. As Micah and Jo’ explore museums and grocery stores and restaurants, Jenkins intersperses the unraveling talk with postcard images of the city. We see the beauty of the fountains and rolling hills, but we never forget that it shall soon all belong solely to those with the trust fund to afford tenancy.

Made for a microbudget of $13,000, Medicine for Melancholy looks nothing like the work of a new filmmaker working with little money. Perhaps Jenkins’ library of gorgeous short films provided him with the toolset to create a cohesive work of art. The use of color alone stands as a testament to the film’s aesthetic prowess. In the opening scene, we see only tinges of red and pink. Otherwise, that moment remains a stark black and white. Scene by scene, the director introduces little pops of color, a technique reminiscent of Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, Ratcatcher, and also of turn-of-the-century pictures that featured color-tinting. As the nature of our two subjects’ relationship grows more profound, fissures of warm light break open against the gray palette.

Final Thoughts: The Poetry of Jenkins’ Cinema

Though the director adapts his films from other literary genres—to date sources include a novel and an unproduced play—his cinema also gives a proper nod to poetry. The literary genre celebrates and laments a host of concepts: language, storytelling, musicality, imagination, form, death, and love. These pillars also provide the ingredients that bring cinema to life, and few filmmakers accomplish such a feat with the deft craft that Barry Jenkins uses to light up our screens. The unfulfilled desires explored in the three films featured above remind one of lines from Terrence Hayes’ title poem from his book Wind in a Box:

I claim in the last hour of this known hysterical breathing
that I have nothing to give, but a signature of wind,
my type-written handwriting reconfiguring the past.

To the boy with no news of my bound and bountiful kin,
I offer twelve loaves of bread. Governed by hunger,
he only wanted not to want.  What is the future

beyond a premonition? What is the past
beyond desire? To my brother, I leave a new suit, a tie
made of silk and shoes with unscuffed bottoms.

The poem continues to reveal a litany of wishes the speaker holds for those he loves, and in so doing, Hayes writes with the same high-intensity yearning with which Jenkins makes a movie. Both make requests for their subjects, well-meaning hopes that never come to fruition. Balancing the beauty of the director’s visual style with the brutality of his candid storytelling, the filmmaker understands the intricacies of aesthetic judgement. But the gorgeousness of the camera movements never deflects the reality of the story. Instead, the form highlights the content, making the characters less of a case study and more of a human being.