By the time James Baldwin’s fifth novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, came out in 1974, he had already defected to the south of France–had been there for four years, in fact. And so, when his protagonist, Alonzo a.k.a. Fonny (Stephan James), tells his fresh out of prison (for wrongly being accused of stealing a car) friend, Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry), that he just needs to get together enough dough to leave this country, there is more than a hint of Baldwin’s own life in the line. Baldwin, who knew he was born in a country where no one is more hated than “the nigger.” Speaking his thoughts and social commentary on the fundamental brokenness of America, Baldwin’s unsung heroes are rendered with careful consideration to the screen by Barry Jenkins (still riding high on 2016’s Moonlight, though not on the high of having his film’s moment stolen by incompetent blancos falsely announcing at the 2017 Oscars, “La La Land,” as the winner of Best Picture).
In fact, this very significant cultural moment in somehow managing to soil an event that was truly momentous for black people speaks to what Daniel tells Fonny during this heightened scene of discussing the insurmountable dead ends and according wasted potential of the black community: “White man has got to be the devil.” It is a running motif throughout the script, where Tish (KiKi Layne)–just nineteen to Fonny’s twenty-two–must fight against the windmills only to make less than a millimeter of progress in freeing her soul mate from prison. For yes, he, too, ends up wrongly accused after his conversation with Daniel. Foreshadowing can be such a bitch (in addition to love, and love obstructed, of course). Worst of all, the crime he’s accused of is rape. Rape. As in, the crime that white men never get convicted of when they’re reported. But because of a wrong place, wrong time series of events spurred on by a vindictive police officer, Fonny is picked out of a lineup by the emotionally fragile and therefore easily swayed Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios). Already frazzled from the abandonment of her husband after birthing three of his kids, Victoria’s erratic behavior leaves the witness in the most control of Fonny’s fate as the obviously racially discriminatory Officer Bell (Ed Skrein).
The same officer who saw Fonny the night he would conceive his son with Tish. Unfortunately, it is Tish who is left with the terrifying task of having to inform both her parents and Fonny’s of this turn of events. While her own mother and father, Sharon (Regina King) and Joseph (Colman Domingo), are at least somewhat open-minded, Tish must contend with Fonny’s “holy roller” of a matriarch, Mrs. Hunt (Aunjanue Ellis). As one of the first major dramatic scenes to occur, the tension on all sides is compounded by the presence of Tish’s protective sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris) and Fonny’s shrewish sisters–not to mention his father, Frank Hunt (Michael Beach), who is more on the side of the Rivers family as we watch the contention unfurl in the form of Mrs. Hunt cursing Tish’s bastard child via religious mumbo jumbo. She then looks judgment upon Sharon by touting that at least she didn’t raise daughters that would ever come home pregnant. Ernestine snaps, “That’s ’cause nobody wanna fuck ’em.” Ah yes, family. They’re the only ones who can stick up for you as well as they can hurt you.
And Fonny is Tish’s family. That much was deemed so by the fates from their youth, when they would bathe with one another without even a thought of sexual exploration. Their connection went beyond something so surface. Narrated from Tish’s perspective, her voice sounds constantly far away, almost muffled, an undeniably deliberate editing technique that iterates just how out of body she has to be in order to cope. Just like everyone else from their Harlem neighborhood. As she brutally describes a day in the life of the average black American, “Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives, like flies.”
This was not supposed to happen to Fonny. Good, sweet-natured Fonny who only ever wanted to sculpt and love his girl the best way he knew how. Finding them a place to live from the only other type of person as or more maligned: a Jew. Levy (Dave Franco) is the sole landlord who will rent to them, insisting there’s no scam, he’s just a believer in two people in love, regardless of color. But love will not, contrary to what Captain and Tennille said, keep them together. And Tish can only tell her audience one thing on that subject matter: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
For this is exactly what she must endure as she does her best to blindly navigate the faulty legal system with the help of “another white boy with a degree” by the name of Hayward (Finn Wittrock), still too young to be totally full of shit in lending his legal expertise to the case–something he is, naturally, stigmatized for among his colleagues. Of course, he still needs to be paid for his services, costs that mount as the Rivers family is informed that Victoria, their only hope of exonerating Fonny, has fled back to Puerto Rico, thus, Sharon must fly there to plead on behalf of her honorary son-in-law’s case.
Meanwhile, Frank and Joseph commiserate at the bar about pulling together some hustles to help with the finances to fund all these mounting legal costs. Joseph asks, “You ever had any money.” Frank predictably answers, “No,” prompting Joseph to point out, “You raised them somehow. You fed them somehow, didn’t you? If we start to worrying about money now, man, we are going to be fucked and we going to lose our children. That white man, baby, he want you to be worried about the money. That’s his whole game.”
It is intense exchanges of dialogue such as these regarding the intrinsic way in which the us v. them mindset has rightfully been perpetuated in the U.S. that remind one more than slightly of Spike Lee’s own “style” (if calling out overt and palpable racism is a style). As the sort of movie that’s intended to be “for black people” yet “interesting to white people” (also known as the recipe for an Oscar nomination), one can’t help but think of Lee–how he might have completely ruined this movie with his inability to stray from being overly pedantic (see: BlacKkKlansman). Jenkins, in contrast, toes the line well. The one that shouldn’t need to drive home the point that the justice system in America is rigged to con the black man out of years of his life time and time again. And yet, here we are in 2019, still needing to remind people. Filtered with the lens of love, the picture looks even bleaker, believe it or not.
