MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Simple Case For Moonlight

(This is the second of an unplanned series of three pieces. I wrote the first, about La La Land, because there is an odd backlash within the media about the likely Oscar success of the film. There is no one arguing against Moonlight being celebrated. As with the La La Land column, this will not be about how much I like the film.)

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Moonlight is a miracle, both in the way that all movies are a miracle – a meeting of like minds, efforts, money, and execution – and in that it is a tiny, fragile piece, given wing by not only the talent behind the filmmaking, but by entitles that tend to engage at a larger scale and have come together to support this unique work.

Tarell Alvin McCraney has a remarkable career. He was raised in Miami, one of four kids born to a teen mother who was an addict and who would die of AIDS. He found his way to great success, including more than a dozen plays, a MacArthur Grant, time at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and work at Yale, where he was recently made the chair of playwriting.

Moonlight is built from a play McCraney wrote in school, which wasn’t produced. Barry Jenkins was five years removed from his first feature, Medicine for Melancholy, when he ended up in Europe writing a screenplay from the McCraney play. Jenkins went to Telluride, as he did for years, and introduced 12 Years A Slave at the festival, reigniting a long, quiet conversation with Plan B, the Brad Pitt-Dede Garner-Jeremy Kleiner production company, which would get a Best Picture win with 12 Years and would also get Best Picture nominations for Selma and The Big Short.

Three years later, Jenkins’ Moonlight would premiere at the festival where it was born.

Of course, Moonlight didn’t quite look like other Plan B Oscar movies. The budget was $1.5 million. (The budget for the other Plan B Oscar nominees ranged from $18m to $28m) The distributor was the small but mighty A24, not a major studio or Dependent like the others.

12 Years A Slave didn’t have “major movie stars,” but Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Paul Giamatti, Sarah Paulson and others were familiar faces to moviegoers. Selma had up-and-coming talent, but it also had Martin Luther King, Jr. and a major event in American history standing in as “the star.” And The Big Short was loaded with movie stars.

Moonlight relies on great, somewhat familiar actors, none of whom has played that much in the awards season. (Naomie Harris should have been nominated for her turn in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, but wasn’t.) Naomie Harris was the big name, having been in Bond movies and a couple Pirates of the Caribbeans. Mahershala Ali has fans from “House of Cards.” Janelle Monae was making one of her first films. André Holland is great on “The Knick” and onstage (including McCraney plays). But these are not stars you could throw on a poster and drive ticket sales. (That’s now changing.)

The phenomenon of Moonlight was on full display at Telluride. Audiences were not only screaming and standing on their feet when the movie ended, but many walked the intimate streets of Telluride in a kind of shock, rocked to their core. Men and women. Straight and gay. Some were black… but it is Telluride and well… most were not.

Somehow, in telling a story that was precisely personal to McCraney and personal to Jenkins in some very specific ways but not in others (Barry is straight), Jenkins and his team had created a universal story. A story of an impoverished neighborhood that reached right into a festival attended by the mostly wealthy. A story of drug culture that was not judged in a negative way by people who are much more likely to have their drug of choice delivered by Uber. A story of the fear and pain of growing into maturity as a gay man in a world and at a time when people would rather beat him down than accept him, embraced by a festival of people who… well, identify a lot more than anyone might have imagined with the universal pain of becoming, not matter how much their personal becomings were not specifically reflected by this film.

That is the magic of Moonlight. It is the smallest of films in the way that Hollywood tends to measure size. It is very, very specific. But it explodes on the screen in the way that great movies do, through your soul.

In terms of a wider audience, Moonlight grossed more than its budget in 12 days on just 36 screens. In the 12 weeks between opening and last week’s Best Picture nominations, in which the film has played on a maximum of 650 screens, it grossed $15.9 million. Last weekend, the film expanded to 1104 screens and has picked up another $2 million in the week.

By the time of its nomination, it had already outgrossed the total domestic grosses of recent indie Best Picture nominees like The Tree of Life, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, and A24’s 2016 hit, Room.

These numbers are excellent. And there is a lot of room for growth. Not everyone who sees Moonlight has a life-shaking experience. But many do and no one seems to walk away without deeply appreciating the artistry involved. The word-of-mouth is deeply passionate.

There is an argument out in the world these days that Moonlight is “more important” than other movies because of the color and status of its characters. I would argue that what is important about this film is that it rises above the very specific universe it inhabits and takes us past the color, the mean streets, the drugs, the addiction, the homophobia, and brings us to ourselves.

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One Response to “20 Weeks To Oscar: The Simple Case For Moonlight”

  1. GSpot 3000 says:

    Great write-up, David. Heartfelt, on point.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon