The other day I tweeted about films that I thought were overrated and in that list I mentioned “Moonlight.” First off, obviously it was bold and possibly quite rash of me to go after the film centering largely around a gay man attempting to find himself in an unaccepting environment. But that’s what works best about the film. There are certainly things that are great about the film. The sprawling, dreamlike vistas, the tender moments of silence and passion, the subdued and effective performances. This film does so many things right, but I can’t help but feel like these all add up to less than the sum of its parts. Because while there are undeniable moments of beauty the film really does reach for a massive scope that it can’t quite grasp.
It wanted to be a sprawling epic told over a span of nearly thirty years and showing how men often struggle with masculinity and sexuality in a world that wished to push a very obvious role upon them, but it’s only half of that. The movie glosses over huge chunks of time in between it’s three story lines. Massive moments that affect every character involved take place off screen on more than one occasion and don’t often answer how we had gotten to the place we now find ourselves in. I, in the past, have gone after work for having what I refer to as “30 minutes of good ideas stretched into 90 minutes.” But moonlight is the opposite, it’s three hours of good ideas condensed into 90 minutes. This is where I say the film is a victim of it’s own scope. I never get a full pictures of Moonlights narrative, but rather these smaller pieces held together with a common thread that never came together in anything as concrete as I would have liked. This may be a personal preference but this vignette style of storytelling left me yearning for more, and not in a way I found entirely satisfying.