Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I went by myself to see "IF Beale Street Could Talk" yesterday, as I wanted to catch it before it left the theaters.  As with "Moonlight", Barry Jenkins has bathed the film in a color, this time yellow-gold, instead of blue.  The characters are wonderfully precise, as in James Baldwin's book on which the film is based, though Jenkins has shuffled up the chronology and changed it up a bit.  This is a blues elegy for all the young Black men who get incarcerated mistakenly, or for petty reasons or for racism.  It's of it's time - the seventies - but also nothing has changed in 2019.  We know it, we're in 2019.  So there is an unbearable sadness and hopelessness pervading the film.  Beautiful people, struggling, but to little avail.  The acting is lovely, and Regina King, as the girl Tish's mother, is extraordinary.  It's a lonely, true, but heartfelt world Jenkins' presents us with.  Love is everywhere, if you just look.  But love isn't enough.  It does not overcome.