Why Barry Jenkins’ ‘Medicine for Melancholy’ Still Matters
The 2008 debut from the director of the upcoming film, ‘Moonlight,’ is as relevant today as ever.
In Stanley Kramer’s 1967 drama, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Katharine Houghton plays Joanna Drayton, a white woman who causes a furor in her San Francisco home when she introduces her parents to her fiancé John Prentice — a black doctor played by the exemplary Sidney Poitier. The film was heralded for its then-daring premise of a mixed race couple and marks one of pop culture’s most visible (and equitable) conversations about interracial relationships. Years later, however, the film feels like wide-eyed posturing played out for over 90 minutes. “There will be 100 million people right here in this country who will be shocked, offended, and appalled by you two,” Drayton’s father, played by Spencer Tracy, tells the couple in one of the film’s many impassioned monologues. Tracy might as well have been addressing the audience directly. Days after the film’s release, the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws — which barred whites from marrying anyone deemed “colored” — in the landmark case, Loving v. Virginia. Four months after that decision, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated in Memphis.
The characters in Barry Jenkins’ 2008 film, Medicine for Melancholy, Forty years removed from Guess’s scandalous hypothetical — and on the heels of America electing its first black president — would on the surface appear to be standard bearers of the nation’s progress. The two black leads — played masterfully by Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins — are a pair of hip San Francisco dwellers untethered to the racial shackles present in the 1960s. The two eat brunch, listen to indie rock, and freely date outside of their race. One could almost imagine that somewhere in the idyllic sepia-toned San Francisco present in the film, Joanna Drayton and John Prentice are living out the post racial fantasy espoused in Kramer’s 1968 film. Unlike in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, though, the topic of interracial dating isn’t approached here with incredulity, but instead from the perspective of the black people in such relationships. What we get as a result is one of cinema’s most honest reflections on race and class in America to date.
In the film, Micah (Cenac) wakes up from a one night stand with Joanne (Heggins) and proceeds, with a dastardly charm that could certainly be read as creepiness, to try and turn their encounter into something more. After a lost wallet becomes an opportunity for a second date, we learn that Joanne has a boyfriend — a wealthy art collector who is white and frequently out of town. The film’s narrative delicately unfolds as the two explore the city and discover more about each other. Micah reveals himself to be something of a black historian, lamenting San Francisco’s gentrification and the whitewashing of its black pioneers. “This city is beautiful,” he admits after Joanne asks why he hates it, “you shouldn’t have to be upper middle class to enjoy it.” One wonders what these characters, eight years later, would think of San Francisco now. Would they both have moved to nearby Oakland?
Perhaps the film’s biggest strength — almost certainly to the credit of its writer/director, Barry Jenkins, a black man — is how nuanced the characters are. These aren’t pigmies of black archetypes folded onto some actor looking for a paycheck, but black characters who contain multitudinous experiences. Joanne lives rent-free with her white boyfriend and both characters are avid bikers. For a film set in 2008, this is as modern a representation of blackness as you’d find in 2016. That nuance is also what serves some of Medicine for Melancholy’s most gut-wrenching moments. Towards the end of the film, sensing the close of their euphoric 24 hours together, the couple go out dancing. After a montage fit for the most treacly mid-aughts indie-flick — complete with bespectacled guitar playing and very Brooklyn dancing — Micah becomes upset. “Everything about being indie is associated with being a white person,” he laments. Earlier, we see pictures from his prior relationship with a white woman along with a series of painful Myspace posts written in the fallout. There’s a heartbreaking tension at play seeing these “progressive” black folk in a city as vibrant as San Francisco, isolated to themselves, “do you ever think about just how few of us there are here” Micah asks early on in the film. It’s heady stuff that, above all else, unpacks — or at least attempts to unpack — what the modern black experience is.
Micah’s outburst ends after he snaps at Joanne for even being with a white guy. The pain of his previous relationship clearly lingering, he offers up one last screed before Joanne storms off. “Nine out of ten times its someone of color hanging on to a white person,” he yells, basically at himself.
It’s one of the most uncomfortably real things ever said on the subject and after watching this beautiful black love story unfold — a love story with an expiration date, that is — a pretty depressing idea. If Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was all about a future in which interracial marriage was accepted, Medicine for Melancholy is about a present in which it still isn’t fully understood.
The trailer for Jenkins’ next film, ‘Moonlight,’ premiered last week to rapturous excitement. In the years since the release of Medicine for Melancholy, a great deal of interest from white audiences has been paid to black narratives. Ta Nahisi Coates is something of a household name and the upcoming Nat Turner film, The Birth of a Nation, received the largest distribution deal out of any Sundance film in history. All of this is, of course, a positive. More opportunities than ever exist for black creators to tell their unique stories. Its important, however, to remember the stories we’ve been telling all along, and Medicine for Melancholy remains as essential a story as any.
