Pride Rock and Prejudice: MUFASA: THE LION KING

Mufasa is actually pretty interesting as a Barry Jenkins movie. It’s about community and family forged in opposition to societal pressures to segregate and denigrate. It’s about parents and children pulled apart and finding their ways back to a sense of normality. It’s about the power of legacy, and the cyclical echoes of generational struggle. It’s about a young person trying to find his way in the world, defining himself both with and against what the world tells him he should be. So it’s definitely of a piece with the thematic preoccupations of the director of tender dramas Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk and his broader, metaphorical Underground Railroad. It also has some of his visual interest in a camera that’s motivated by its subjects' movements, joined to their physicality and their interiority. It has some of those Demme-style head-on close-ups and supple, floating motion through its sun-dappled production design. It’s a Jenkins work through and through. You might have to squint a little to see it in this movie, and might miss it if you weren’t prompted to be on the lookout, but there it is nonetheless.

Consider that something of a miracle considering glimpses of heartfelt, recognizably personal material and approach are fighting their way out of the packaging of a prequel to Disney’s 2019 photorealistic computer animated remake of The Lion King. That nadir of the company’s current cycle of remaking its animated classics was a bizarre heartless photocopy—an often shot-for-shot re-rendering of the colorful and expressive big cat Hamlet that studiously sucked every ounce of life from the original hand-drawn lines. The inexpressive realism of the animals’ faces and understated voice performances continually clashed with the script’s high drama and low wisecracks, and the clunky weight and textures aping nature documentary style drained all oomph and pizazz from the musical numbers. Most everything that’s bad about Mufasa carries over from those original sins. That Jenkins—and usual collaborators like production designer Mark Friedberg, editor Joi McMillon, and cinematographer James Laxton, who are also bending the technology to their will as much as animatedly possible given the corporate constraints—gets so much thematic personality and stylistic touches through the sheer tonnage of mandated CG falseness proves he’s one of the strongest directors working today.

He does what he can to bring more personality into the animals’ expressions—and there’s some real progress there. The cubs are pretty cute. They actually emote this time, and the musical numbers have a better bounce and color—though songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda is operating at about half his usual wit and catchiness. (That’s still considerably more than one could say for songs he didn’t write in Moana 2.) At least the movie’s telling a new story. Monkey Rafiki tells it like a legend to Simba’s daughter Kiara, the name a nice nod to the original hand-drawn Lion King 2. Here’s how Mufasa became the Lion King, and how his brother Scar became a scheming outcast, and how he met Sarabi, the lioness with whom he’d have Simba. It’s sometimes moving, sometimes boring, how it reflects the original with a story of a lost cub wandering in the wilderness and a villainous lion hoping to take control of the pride lands. If it weren’t for the Jenkins touches enlivening the lion drama and generational echoes, it’d be pretty flat. It still is sometimes, as it trudges through the dutiful, schematic plotting of Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay. But then there’s that extra tincture of soulfulness in the performances, a little more life in the staging of the animation. It’s not good, exactly, but it’s compelling to see it wrestle between its disparate elements, from relatively serious, engaged emotions to dull cliche. It’s a collision of intent between the earnest and the frivolous. (Consequently, Timon and Pumba’s more self-aware comic relief has never been more discordant, with references to Disney lawyers and the Broadway show.) As is, it’s an intriguing movie fighting valiantly to rise above the mandated mediocrities.

Souls of Black Folk: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker whose images are sensuous, with his cinematographer James Laxton’s light pulling softly and clearly at the details of people’s faces and bodies, pictures cut together with flowing intuitive poetry. But they’re not weightless in their beauty; they’re heavy with meaning, a substance that is the style. His best achievements — the intimate character study Moonlight, the more expansive relationship heartbreaker If Beale Street Could Talk — use their beauty to bring into vivid relief the soft-spoken, slow-rolling interpersonal dilemmas of the people it puts on screen.The velvety texture of his vision, smooth and speckled, would point to inspirations from Wong Kar-Wai and Claire Denis even if he didn’t name them as such in interviews. It’s something of a shock to bring this aestheticized approach into the tropes of slave narratives for The Underground Railroad, a more than 10-hour adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name. The images are unfailingly beautiful, a painterly prose scrawled with Malickian asides attuned to the rhythms of nature and soulful contemplation, even as the subject matter is grim and gory. One of the first shots is of blood hitting a wooden floor, afterbirth mere cuts away from being buried in a garden. The sprawling and epic historical drama — so long and rambling that it can afford to be drawn intimately and unevenly in broad strokes and pinpoint precise portraiture alike — is full of such fraught and freighted imagery. Here, after all, is the birth of our nation, its original sin, buried with the intent to ignore, but springing up fruit from the poisoned tree. Jenkins is nothing if not aware of the power of his images.

The central focus is on the personal trauma of its characters — a catalogue of slavery’s dehumanizing forms — and the tendrils it snakes through society. Jenkins frames his center of attention with loving weight given to her studied expressions. She’s Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave run away from a plantation, northward bound. As her episodic journey takes her through various States — and various states of freedom — she finds herself navigating a variety of responses to White Supremacy. There’s a genteel town where Black and White live side-by-side in a tenuous acceptance. There’s a town where a White couple appears to be helpful to Black plight, but have nefarious ulterior motives. There’s a town where a kindly couple is willing to hide runaway slaves, but only to a point. There’s a prosperous town run entirely by Black people — the series’ high point, featuring some of Jenkins’ loveliest sun-drenched images, the better to signal the power of hope, some compelling speechifying from the cast, and the looming threat of White violence from those in the next town over. At each stop, Cora sees society forming and reforming around the voids left by prejudice, violence, and despair — the damage, the potential, and the inescapability of certain destruction. The story cuts backwards and forwards in time, exploring characters’ histories, their families, and the cycles of pain they endure—while finding time for oases of love and connection, too.

The ramifications of slavery — the long-lasting physical and emotional toll, and its generational traumas — are written across every painful picturesque image. An early scene gives us a point-of-view shot from a man being burned alive, the image blurring, blinking. Jenkins spares us the worst of the violence by taking us inside. Somehow it hurts all the more. It’s a signal as to his interest in enlivening history through literary accumulation of empathetic detail. It extends to the entire rambling narrative and expansive ensemble. Among the panoply of supporting characters, the most poignant and fascinating has to be a young Black boy (Chase W. Dillon) who tags along as the assistant to a slave catcher (Joel Edgerton). Well dressed, and with a poise beyond his years, he carries with him the complicated ways one can react to a dehumanizing state. He’s won some degree of safety, and yet his interactions with the people around him, White and Black alike, carry an ambiguity as to his ultimate allegiances. That such complication is carried in the boyish face — held so eerily placid, even inscrutable — says so much about the ways in which the systems of oppression warp and linger in one’s behavior. Jenkins’ visions of humanity keeps this in sharp focus, staging his patient shots that look straight ahead without flinching as character’s ravel and unravel.

It’s full of decisions: strong and bold. Though the many hours are sometimes a jumble of incident — pokey in the way to which all prestige miniseries these days, even ones with craft of this high level, succumb — it has enough track to provoke and compel, to lose you and win you back over and over. For every striking, compelling moment, there is a languorous, aimless downtime that will come slowly back into focus. By the end, the totality is an enormous and overwhelming whole, rough and rattled despite the patience and beauty on the surface. My biggest point of contention is with Jenkins’ boldest stroke: carrying over Whitehead’s novel’s central metaphor literalizing the Underground Railroad not as a covert trail of safe houses and brave rescuers, but as an actual train chugging along buried deep beneath the ground. He takes it seriously, and has his characters treat it as fact. There are moments of eerie allegory as this sunken place subway avant la lettre comes puffing out of the darkness, staffed by kindly mysterious people of color willing to lend an ear or disappear. (It also rhymes unexpectedly movingly off the first episode's credits' surprising blast of OutKast: “you can’t stop a train.”) But just as often its metaphorical presence strikes me as less interesting than the historical truths it intends to express symbolically. Besides, when Jenkins digs deep into other moments of sideways historical invention, he does so with a specificity and attention to psychological detail that needs no too-clever fantasy to sell its intensity. Still, I’m grateful for his efforts to bring something like honest to goodness filmmaking worth wrestling with to our TV screens, a Decalogue of slave narratives yearning to be free from the ordinary tropes with which we’re sometimes numbed. This is filmmaking that’s alive and provoking, dense with allusion, alive with intriguing figures, heavy with electric pessimism and hard-fought slivers of grace and hope.

Black and Blue: MOONLIGHT

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a movie about being Black and blue, about the sensitive emotional bruises of a melancholy young African American man growing up a misfit. He’s looking for connections – parental, friendly, romantic – and yet can hardly admit to himself how deeply his yearning goes, and in which directions it grows. It takes raw material that’d easily slip into standard issue social drama and fits it to a far more embodied and expressive form, rippling with tangible detail, staging dialogue scenes freighted with pregnant pauses and tender nuances under a softly crackling mood. It’s a coming-of-age and a coming-out story, a boy realizing he’s different as he’s trying to find his place. He’s a young boy, growing up impoverished in Miami, learning to fend for himself, drawn to a compassionate surrogate father figure: the neighborhood drug dealer who supplies his addict mother with her fix. He’s a teenager, shy and withdrawn, barely registering the slight trembles of flirtation with a brash peer’s similarly unspoken desires. He’s a young man, bulkier, tougher, more confident, but with a soft sweetness drawn out with the right words.

Told in three sections – each a resonant short film unto itself – Jenkins, adapting a work by Tarell Alvin McCraney, structures the film around relationships in the process of forming or deforming. In the first part, we meet the boy (Alex Hibbert) as he’s taken under the wing of the dealer (Mahershala Ali). He’s spotted alone, fleeing both the rough boys who tease him and the mother (Naomie Harris) in and out of her highs. The older man treats him to kindness, a gentle respect that cuts against the typical drug dealer stereotype. Consider a quietly stunning scene in which the boy, having internalized a bullying jeer, comprehending the intent without understanding the words, asks the fatherly influence, “What’s a fag?” There’s a long silence while the man chooses his words carefully and generously. Jenkins allows to hang in the empty space the potential for calamity (stoked, perhaps, by our culture’s preoccupation with miserable worst-case-scenario “realism” in this sort of fiction, an erroneous denial of possibilities for kindness, grace, and small favors). The release, and relief, comes as the boy gets exactly the right age-appropriate advice, an oasis of support in a turbulent childhood.

We next meet him as a teenager (Ashton Sanders), sullen and withdrawn, beholden to his mother’s whims and his social isolation. The rippling tensions he carries between his shoulder blades is bound to erupt—maybe in a tender moment of hesitant pleasure on the beach, or an explosive moment of violence in the cafeteria. They each have their momentary satisfactions for the boy. But neither get him all the way to where he wants to be. The movie’s final act—scenes, really—is a reconnection between the boy, now-grown man (Trevante Rhodes), and an old friend (André Holland). In Wong Kar-wai wooziness and smoky smoldering, the men hesitantly reminisce, tight-lipped and taciturn dialogue loaded with implication. For that’s what the movie’s best at, Jenkins mining the unspoken and the half-whispered for the expressively lit and intuitively cut connections that draw out the melodrama of the everyday. Here’s a tremendous work of empathy and sensitivity, moving and melodious as it lets its characters’ vulnerabilities draw them further into themselves, while holding out the possibility of fuller self-expression.