Barry Jenkins, the screenwriter and director behind the beautiful new film Moonlight, grew up in Liberty City, the Miami neighborhood where the story is set. So did Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play on which the movie is based, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Jenkins, 37, was raised by a single mother who became addicted to crack. So was McCraney, 36. Jenkins’s mom contracted HIV; McCraney’s died of AIDS. The two men didn’t know each other at the time, but they have together brought the hyper specificity and full emotional heft of their lived experience to bear on the story of Chiron, a poor, black, and gay boy who comes of age in a Liberty City housing project.
It is difficult to sum up all that feels new about Moonlight, which puts a fresh lens on so many things at once. There is at least one unifying element, though: the film’s insistence that the humanity of every character be brought to the fore. A person may deal drugs for money, but no moral baggage is ascribed to this detail; it recedes into the background, having nothing whatever to do with their value system. Dollars from the household of a dealer may end up in Chiron’s pocket and later in the hands of Chiron’s mother, who doubtless will return them to a dealer. But the drug economy in which the characters live does not define them as human beings. It’s merely a feature of the landscape, where air is humid, birds chirp, people disappear, and small bills flow in a circle.
Moonlight, which is up for six Golden Globes and is likely to earn as many Oscar nominations, leaves a lasting impression on your mind and eye, and its impact is not limited to yourpresent field of vision. The film has a retroactive effect. That it should feel so radical—for a kid from the projects to be portrayedwith a complete, three-dimensional portrait—stirs up a heightened, devastating awareness of how rare a thing this is.
If the empathic power of Moonlight defies easy categorization, it can be trickier still to put your finger on what is singular about the cinematography. When we tell stories about characters in this context, the go-to style is often a bleak realism. Dark colors and harsh light is the appropriate lens, we seem to have decided, for dark circumstances and harsh realities. But Moonlight is more Wong Kar Wai than The Wire. Color and light are tools for transcendence, used to reframe and illuminate. Miami is a sublime fever dream of pastels and neon, lush greens and glistening, perspiring skin tones.
The film opens with a very stylized, swirling shot of a drug dealer, Juan, played by the magnificent Mahershala Ali. “It’s sort of a fake-out,” the film’s director of photography, James Laxton, said recently. We were at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, sitting at a table in an otherwise empty lounge. “The scene is about a dealer interacting with his guy on the corner, right? Which is a scene I think we have seen. It’s a very familiar interaction. But the next cut is to a child running through tall grass, and handheld, somewhat frenetic camera movement.”
The switch-up in camera style portends a switch-up of archetypes. In the next scene, the child, Little (Chiron’s nickname when he is young), played by Alex Hibbert, interacts with the dealer we have already met, Juan, in a way I will characterize only as unexpected. (The teenage Chiron is played by Ashton Sanders in the second act, the adult Chiron by Trevante Rhodes in the third.) The camera, said Laxton, is playing with our associations by saying, in effect, “Here’s something you’ve seen before. Maybe you think you know what’s about to come in the next hour and a half.”
You don’t, and that’s the point. In Moonlight, clichés and tropes exist only so they can be upended. This is done substantively, with the emotional terrain of the characters, and it’s done visually, with angles and light. The most mesmerizing scene immerses you in the blue-green water of the Atlantic as Juan teaches Little to swim, complicating notions of masculinity and fatherhood while overturning a racist stereotype. In another shot, Little’s mom, Paula, played by the brilliant Naomie Harris, is bathed in pink light as she fumes at her son. Laxton explained: “In that moment, when she’s very angry at her son, the pink light tips the audience to a different aspect of her, a different side to her.”
Laxton went to film school with Jenkins in the early aughts, at the Florida State Film School in Tallahassee, where for a time the two were roommates. (Moonlight’s editors, Joi McMillon and Nat Sanders, were schoolmates, as was one of the its producers, Adele Romanski, to whom Laxton is now married.) Laxton also shot Jenkins’s previous film, Medicine for Melancholy. Their 15-year history affords Laxton “an intimate pre-production period not often given to a cinematographer.”
References were identified early on: Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, Spike Lee’s Clockers, the films of Claire Denis. Realism was avoided, with an understanding that when a setting is visually pathologized, so too are the human beings in it. “I think what’s happened is that the realistic aesthetic applied to drug addiction, or lower socioeconomic classes, portrays the characters as having dark or depressive mentalities,” Laxton said. “What that’s done over the last, say, 30 years is it has made the audience assume that of these communities. Which is ever so fucked up, actually.”
They decided to use a digital camera called the ARRI Alexa, because with non-actors in the cast, they did not want to be inhibited by film stock, and because, of the digital options, the Alexa is best at rendering natural skin tone, Laxton said. They also used anamorphic lenses, which normally allowmultiple characters to play out a scene in the same wide-screen frame. “We used it as the opposite of that, to show the character alone within this vast frame, to emphasize the isolation.” Laxton added, “It’s a format, a kind of lens, that is associated with large blockbuster movies: the Star Treks, the Star Wars. It’s for grand stories and big-scope thoughts. Maybe subconsciously we chose it for Moonlight in an effort to depict this community in a brand new light.”
These choices may be subtle, but their cumulative effect is why theNew York Times film critic A. O. Scott described Moonlight as “a poem written in light.” In this poem, there is little place for commentary. “Judgment is something I think I’m very concerned with in filmmaking,” Laxton said. “The idea of judgment. It’s something that as a cinematographer you are constantly aware of. How you are depicting someone. How the light looks on someone’s face. How high-angle is something? How long-angle is something? How the camera’s moving through a space. All of these things speak to judgment. It’s what our job is: To depict a judgment.” There is an inherent tension, then, between his role and the effect he is hoping to elicit. “Those two things are at complete odds with one another. It’s my job to depict judgment, yet I’m ultimately searching for a way to get the audience to relinquish that judgment and to just be watchful.”
We asked Laxton to describe his approach to shooting four of Moonlight’s most striking scenes, moments in the film when color and camerawork are particularly integral to the story and evocative of the place and people. “The light in Miami is so specific,” Laxton said. “When you walk around the city, perspiration is inherent to the experience. There’s a certain beauty to the sheen.”