While a small indie called Moonlight was being nominated for every award in sight, I went to
see The Beauty Queen of Leenane. This
very dark, very Irish comedy is the
first play of Martin McDonagh, who has also made his mark in the film world by
writing and directing In Bruges. That
well-regarded 2008 film focuses on two Irish hitmen on the lam, hanging out in
the medieval Belgian city. The brogues are thick and the mood is macabre. These
characteristics also mark McDonagh plays like the astonishingly bloody The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a family
story, but hardly one that’s warm and fuzzy. Unfolding in a rustic village
outside Galway, it illustrates the mortal combat between a lovelorn middle-aged
daughter and a mother who—though
physically feeble—rules the roost.
It’s curious, really, that this play brought me back to my earlier
viewing of Moonlight. The
similarities are not obvious. The Beauty
Queen is rural and Irish; Moonlight is
urban and African-American. But both take place in small, tight social enclaves
whose members feel themselves shut out of mainstream society. In Beauty Queen it’s poor Irish folk so
economically stressed that they need to take lowly jobs among the despised
English. In Moonlight it’s a section
of Miami where black Americans scramble to get by, often resorting to jobs that
border on (or slip over the border into) criminal behavior. That being said,
the characters in Moonlight can’t be
judged solely by their relationship to the rule of law. The film’s one
sympathetic father figure, the man who provides a stabilizing influence in the
life of a young outcast, is also – and unabashedly – a drug dealer. (He, played
by the charismatic Mahershala Ali, is the one gently cradling young Chiron in
the ocean after his first swimming lesson; it’s the visual image most often
used to advertise Moonlight, and it
captures the film’s blend of tenderness and terror.)
The Beauty Queen pinpoints
the complex love/hate relationship
between mother and (grown) daughter. For me possibly the most interesting
strand in Moonlight is the
relationship between an overstressed mother and her growing son. She (in the
person of the magnificent Naomie Harris) is trying hard to raise and to love
this young boy, whose shyness and gender confusion make him a natural target
for bullies. At the same time, she’s dealing not only with poverty but also
with her own drug habit, which causes her to lean over-heavily on a young man
who needs her to be strong.
Both Maureen in The
Beauty Queen and Chiron in Moonlight have
secrets they won’t admit even to themselves. Chiron’s is that in a world where
machismo is prized, he is attracted to men, not women. Director Barry Jenkins’
sensitive handling of this topic is part of the reason this film has gotten so
much acclaim. He also does beautiful things with a true ensemble cast, one that
includes three young actors playing Chiron in boyhood, adolescence, and young
manhood.
But there’s one unfortunate way that the film resembles the
play I saw at the Mark Taper Forum. This was a true Irish production from
Dublin’s Nomad theatre ensemble, and the accents of the all-Irish cast were at
times too opaque to be understood. And Moonlight
left me equally flummoxed. I’ve heard the film praised by a critic who
mentioned that he’d seen it three times. Frankly, it may take three tries to
understand some key plot points that the actors’ style of enunciation – however
authentic – kept me from understanding. How frustrating to be shut out by
language!
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