“Moonlight”, The Door And A Whole Life in Moments
Life rarely announces itself. It’s a series of small moments strung together to reveal a greater whole. That’s something that great films, like MOONLIGHT, understand well.
Few films have said as much with so little as Barry Jenkins’s. It gives you everything you need to make sense of Chiron’s life, but it never tells you what to think. And nothing better captures MOONLIGHT’s beautiful subtlety than the door.
When Chiron is a child, the drug dealer Juan cares for him. That is, by itself, a brilliant bit of subversion. Juan helps Chiron understand how to be himself in a world allied against him. Much of the time, the sentiments are beautiful and moving — “black boys look blue in moonlight.”
But at one critical moment, Juan’s wisdom is sober and almost cruel.
While Chiron eats at Juan’s table, the man chastises the boy for sitting with his back to the door. He turns Chiron around, so that he can always see if someone is coming for him. This is a cold truth, learned in an unforgiving and violent world.
Years later, Chiron is a grown man, grown into a man not unlike Juan, though we the audience and he himself know he was not always destined to be such a person. Perhaps with that in mind, he visits on a whim Kevin, a friend who gave him the most special and meaningful and intimate moment of his life.
He sits in Kevin’s diner. They reconnect, cautiously and awkwardly but sweetly. As Kevin steps away, Chiron looks toward the diner door. He has positioned himself, as Juan taught him, facing the entrance. So he won’t be caught off guard. That’s wisdom that has likely served him well over these years, as Chiron built a life that never quite felt like his.
It is a flitting moment. The boy now grown looks to the door and almost winces. It’s so brief you might not notice. But it’s there and Jenkins makes sure you see it.
In that moment, so much of Chiron’s life is laid bare. The touching if misguided wisdom of Juan — a man painfully aware of his own mistakes, who tried to do right by this one wayward boy and yet helped to lead him here, where he can’t feel completely safe in the presence of a dear friend. A country, America, that takes a sensitive and perceptive boy like Chiron and helps mold him into a cliche. The cosmic forces at work in each of our lives that turn us into who we are, no matter who we might want to be.
As much as an hour passes between these two connected moments. Minimal dialogue announces their arrival, their passing or their meaning. But in those handful of seconds, Jenkins shows us everything we need to know.
