On 'Moonlight' and 'Spotlight': Two of the decade's best films reveal something deeper in light of each other.

Last year, Spotlight emerged as one of the great films of 2015 and of the decade, the All the President’s Men of our time. Spotlight tells the story of the Boston Globe reporters investigating sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the Boston archdiocese. Their investigation led to the exposure of not one, but hundreds of American priests who raped children over the last fifty years, and whose deeds were repeatedly covered up by Church leaders. Spotlight is a great movie because it tells a big, urgent story with specificity, clarity, and conviction. Moonlight, which may be the best film of 2016, tells us a small but no less moving story with as much specificity and clarity and conviction and is, I think, a great film too. And while these movies have tangential connections—both of them deal with children, one way or another, being abused or neglected—it’s in their ability to unearth beauty and truth in the face of lies and sheer ugliness that these films emerge as great, moving, powerful, important works of art, movies that deserve to be remembered in the years to come. 

Moonlight, the second feature film of writer-director Barry Jenkins, is a film about identity that speaks with particularity, and therefore, uncovers something universal: The people and circumstances in our lives shape us for better or worse into the people we become, and the most tragic thing about life is the hope that almost materializes but is snuffed out like a spark under a heavy foot. And yet, Moonlight wages a fierce hope for its main character, a man struggling with his identity and his sexuality, a man whose childhood sears him with an eternal silence, because speaking up isn’t in the cards.

When I walked out of the theater last week, I felt elated, completely lifted out of myself and into the world of this movie. It’s a hard world, riddled with tragedies big and small, but Jenkins unearths a great deal of beauty too. When we first meet Chiron, a young black boy growing up in the Miami hood, he’s running from bullies who keep making fun of him for being gay, a word he doesn’t yet understand at the age of seven. But Chiron doesn’t only run from mean kids at school; he runs from home too. Chiron’s mother Paula (the marvelous Naomie Harris) is addicted to drugs, and thus totally unpredictable. Sometimes she’s loving and sympathetic, and other times, when she’s strung out on crack, she turns into a screaming, ranting lunatic, and Chiron never knows which version of his mom he will meet when he crosses the threshold of their apartment. 

The film traces Chiron’s journey from childhood to manhood, and is thus divided into three parts, with three different actors playing Chiron: Alex Hibbert as “Little” (Chiron at 7 or 8), Ashton Sanders as just Chiron, age 16-17, and Trevante Rhodes as “Black,” a grown-up Chiron who’s become harder and more guarded after a childhood of questioning and struggle and disappointment, but who’s offered a moment of grace in the rekindling of a relationship with Kevin (played as an adult by Andre Holland), a childhood friend who one day betrays him. 

One of those disappointments is the feeling of betrayal Chiron experiences when he discovers that Juan, his father figure (played by Mahershala Ali) sells drugs for a living. Juan is tender and compassionate, not the qualities we imagine when we think of drug dealers, but Jenkins pushes that conflict to the forefront of the movie: When Juan discovers Paula smoking crack with some unknown male friend, he scolds her for being an irresponsible mother, but she throws his hypocrisy right in his face, and screams at him, “Are you gonna raise my son?”, her voice defensive and defiant and desperate all at once. 

And yet Juan is compassionate. It’s clear to everyone that “Little” (Chiron) is gay, but Chiron doesn’t understand his sexuality, nor is he equipped to deal with the cruel jeers and torments of the schoolyard. “What’s a faggot?” 7-year-old Chiron asks Juan, his face long with shame and ignorance. Juan pauses before answering: “It’s a word used to make gay people feel bad about themselves.” The tragedy of Moonlight is that this important relationship is compromised and ultimately short-lived. Juan teaches Chiron how to swim, and in a perfect world, Juan could teach Chiron how to live, how to be a man, how to be secure in his own skin. But Chiron cannot reconcile the fact that Juan sells drugs, that he is symbolically if not literally connected to his mother’s drug addiction. 

Spotlight asks us to look honestly at the institutions we hold dear; it never asks us to give them up, only to be honest, to seek justice. Moonlight asks us to merely look as it unfolds a particular story for us, of a particular boy’s life, and one that viewers like me have likely not seen enough of in movies or in real life. True, these films are about two different things. Chiron isn’t sexually abused by priests; but he is a young poor black boy, someone who’s liable to be abused in other ways if not sexually, someone who’s liable to become a statistic in the same way that thousands of children were mere statistics to the leaders in the Roman Church. So ultimately, they’re about the same thing: the ways that power affects people at the most basic levels. Spotlight gives us the devastating numbers, and it puts the hammer in the hands of people who, confronted with the truth, must act according to conscience or remain complicit; Moonlight is the poem that breathes vitality into the statistics and the facts. We may not walk away seeing the connection between these two films, but inevitably, the connection is there to be found: Society cannot look itself in the mirror without asking if it’s done right by the “least" among us, the kids so often forgotten.

What is all the more beautiful about Moonlight is its humanity. In the end, Chiron isn’t a statistic, or a tragedy, or a lesson about society’s ills. He’s a man, with a beating heart, with a destiny, with faults and little tragedies of his own, tragedies he must bear and overcome, and with desires he must learn to live with, confront, and lean into.

With Janelle Monae, as Teresa, Juan’s girlfriend and the only stable mother Chiron has ever had. Music by Nicholas Britell.

Selma

Movies are at their most powerful when they have their way with us, invading our consciousness in a way that only movies can. To insist that people experience films (or any other art) only on the basis that it is educational and socially important, sours the experience and sometimes limits the visceral, unmitigated power of movies. And when people treat a movie as a sacrosanct historical document, the act of going to see it can turn, quite unexpectedly, into a passive, self-serving political statement. “You have to see American Sniper because it’s a tribute to the troops.” “I liked The Help, therefore I am not a racist.” It can feel like any criticism of such films makes you somehow un-patriotic, or worse yet, un-American (a quality that would certainly not endear you to the likes of American Sniper’s hero). However, I will resist the urge to badger you and demand that you see Selma, a film that I absolutely loved, on the basis of its historical or social importance. (Although, it is indeed important in both of those aspects, among many others.) Undoubtedly, Selma will make its way into American History classrooms across the country in the coming years, but for regular movie-going people, it can still be treated as a movie, not just a corrective historical diorama. These two things can be equally important, making it difficult to separate the historical importance of the film from the art of the film. But I will attempt to do that anyway.  

Selma pulls you into its world in an emotionally direct way. Scenes of real injustice and tragedy, such as the 1963 bombing of a black church in Alabama (which left four girls dead) are shocking, disturbing, heartbreaking, and provide the necessary jolt of anger and urgency that, I think, is representative of the 1960s and the way people really did feel. The writer-director of Selma, Ava DuVernay, knows how to ratchet up the right amount of empathy from the audience without milking us. In the hands of the wrong director, Selma would be content in its moral certitude. In DuVernay’s hands, Selma is urgent and bold and even hopeful. It’s beautifully made without seeming too careful. 

DuVernay has received a lot of flack for her alleged twisting of historical facts, namely a mischaracterization of President Lyndon Johnson. DuVernay tacitly owned up to this accusation by playing the “I’m-an-artist-I-don’t have-to-be-historically-accurate” card. But, allow me to take a moment and list every historical film I can think of in the next 30 seconds that has been accused of deliberately twisting facts: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Paul Berg’s Lone Survivor, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, the HBO mini-series John Adams, Disney’s Pocahontas, Oliver Stone’s JFK, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and all those other Jesus films where Jesus is played by a pasty-white British guy—he may as well be offering the Disciples some tea and crumpets—and every big-studio movie about the Roman Empire in which the actors brandished English accents. So what’s the answer? Do we rail against filmmakers who don’t adhere to, as Dickens put it in Hard Times, “the facts; just the facts”? Or do we realize that it’s not Hollywood’s job to be 100% accurate in historical films?

The answer lies somewhere in-between. There is no formula to nail down how to respond to these movies when they ignore or manipulate facts for their own purposes. Fiction does not have to be dishonest. Good fiction speaks truth in the most invented moments. And if we approach historical films in this way, I think we’ll be better served by the filmmakers who are doing honest work even when that work wouldn’t necessarily fly as gospel truth. (Isn’t it our responsibility to know the facts anyway?) In Selma, a movie that gets so much of the tone of the civil rights movement right, I’m not all that worried about the portrayal of LBJ (played in the film by Tom Wilkinson, who’s very good as usual). Johnson doesn’t come off that badly. DuVernay depicts him as a shrewd politician who knew that racial equality was morally right, even though he didn’t always want to deal with it or with Martin Luther King’s constant insisting for swift and sweeping federal action.

Here’s an interesting fact: Selma is the only piece of narrative film that’s ever been made directly about Martin Luther King. Is that surprising? People are up in arms over the lack of Oscar nominations for Selma, but perhaps we should be more concerned that it took this long to get a movie about Martin Luther King made in the first place.

And it’s a knockout of a movie. The performance of David Oyelowo as King is surely one of the best performances of the last year. Oyelowo’s power on screen carries Selma, and would have saved it even if it had been a total disaster. The way he spins a phrase of dialogue or belts out a compelling speech—many of which could be rendered cheesy or ineffectual if uttered by the wrong actor—is a marvelous thing to behold. Oyelowo has such conviction, such strength, that one feels captivated by him. He makes it clear how the movement needed a man like King, who may have been arrogant and flawed, but who possessed a sure-footed vision for progress and an unwavering belief in his own dignity.   

Duvernay doesn’t shy away from King’s infidelities and their effect on his wife, Coretta Scott King. (She’s played by Carmen Ejogo, who gives an equally strong performance.) And then there’s Oprah, who co-produced Selma and who appears in a supporting role as Selma resident Annie Lee Cooper. The movie opens with Cooper bravely walking into the Selma courthouse and applying for a voter registration card. The sleazy government flunky behind the desk denies Cooper her registration after she fails to name all 67 judges in Alabama. (Cooper does manage to produce the number, as well as recite the Preamble to the Constitution from memory; but this isn’t enough to satisfy Selma’s rigid, racist policies.) I have to wonder if Oprah doesn’t enjoy playing frumpy poor women since she’s so wealthy herself. (I’m reminded of Marie Antoinette, who thought the poor were so enchanting that she pretended to be a rural housewife, to the point that she had a little cottage built and a field to “work in.” It’s sort of like having your very own working-class-themed amusement park.) But Oprah is very good, and she gets some moments of triumph, like when she stands her ground amidst the hostile insults of a redneck police officer. And God bless her for helping to get this movie made.

Finally, regarding the Oscar controversy: Selma was nominated for Best Picture and Best Song, but none of the performances were nominated. David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo deserved to be recognized by the Academy for their work. Nobody can change that now, but just thinking about their fine portrayals of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King makes me happy that this movie exists and hopeful about future projects for these two performers and for their director. Every year the Oscars manage to ignore good people and good movies (like The Immigrant, which got nothing). Julianne Moore still doesn’t have an Oscar. (Although that will hopefully change this year.) And let’s remember that Forrest Gump once won the Oscar for Best Picture. If that’s not a travesty, I don’t know what is.

Selma was photographed by Bradford Young; music by Jason Moran; with: Common, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Wendell Pierce, Andre Holland, Tessa Thompson, Lorraine Tousaint, Colman Domingo, Keith Stanfield, Tim Roth, Giovanni Ribisi, Trai Byers, Stephan James, Omar Dorsey, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Alessandro Nivola, Ledisi Young, and Jeremy Strong.