Barry Jenkins's second feature. A three-part character study, a Best Picture win, and the ceremony that briefly handed the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty.
Three acts, three actors as the same protagonist. Act 1 (Little): Chiron, a quiet ten-year-old in Miami's Liberty City, is found hiding in an abandoned crack house by a local drug dealer named Juan. Juan and his girlfriend Teresa take Chiron in for the day. Chiron's mother is becoming addicted to the substances Juan sells. Act 2 (Chiron): Chiron is sixteen, bullied at school, with a sexual experience with his friend Kevin on a moonlit beach that ends the next day in violence Kevin is pressured into participating in. Act 3 (Black): Chiron is in his late twenties, a drug dealer in Atlanta, when Kevin calls him for the first time in years.
The film's structural risk is the three-actor lead. Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes play Chiron at different ages without continuity of physicality. The risk is the audience accepting all three as the same person. The risk works.
Moonlight is Barry Jenkins's second feature; his first, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), had been a $13,000 indie. Moonlight cost $4m. Both films are conscious of their indie scale; Moonlight is the rare American film of recent decades to deliver, on a small budget, work that does not feel small. Jenkins shot the film in Miami in 25 days.
The film was acquired by A24 at the Telluride Film Festival in 2016 for under $1m. It grossed $65m worldwide. The film's three-act, three-actor structure — adapted by Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney from McCraney's unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue — was the structural risk that gave the film its power.
The 2017 Academy Awards ceremony, at which Moonlight beat La La Land for Best Picture, is the most-watched moment in modern Oscar history. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope. The La La Land team was on stage giving acceptance speeches for several minutes before the mistake was caught. Producer Jordan Horowitz interrupted his own speech to call the Moonlight team to the stage.
The mix-up was, briefly, the cultural moment that overshadowed the substance of the win. The substance: Moonlight became the first film with an all-Black cast to win Best Picture, the first LGBTQ-themed Best Picture winner, and the lowest-budget Best Picture winner in decades. Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim actor to win an acting Oscar. The film's win was, by any reading, a structural shift in what the Academy was willing to honour.
James Laxton, Jenkins's college roommate and longtime DP, shot Moonlight with attention to skin tone that American cinema has historically not paid. The film's colour grading is intensely warm — orange-and-blue saturation, soft contrast, light that seems to drape onto skin rather than fall onto it. The technique was an explicit response to the way film stocks and digital cameras have historically been calibrated for lighter skin and have under-represented darker skin tones.
Nicholas Britell's score is the film's other defining element. Britell uses 'chopped and screwed' techniques — a Houston-rap audio technique of pitch-shifting and slowing down recordings — on classical instrumentation. The result is a string score that sounds like both contemporary Black musical tradition and European concert tradition simultaneously. Britell has scored every subsequent Jenkins film and was nominated for Oscars for Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and others.