If Beale Street Could Talk

Beautifully shot, but emotionally languid

Studs Terkel: Did you feel a sense of shame about a heritage that is really so rich_, when you accepted the white man's stereotype of yourself?_

James Baldwin: I'm afraid that is one of the great dilemmas, one of the great _psychological hazards, of being an American Negro. In fact, much more than that. I've seen a great many people go under because of this dilemma. Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, w__here all standards and all the images, when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see, none of it applies to you. You go to white movies a...

This is a beautifully filmed experience; thereafter a sort of emotional torpor sets in and it struggles to make headway in self-made heavy seas. The story, upon which it is based, offers us yards of controversial and harrowing material to work from, and ample scope to develop the characterisations, but somehow this just finds it's way into a cul-de-sac and never really discovers a way out. The cast, especially Regina King's emotionally fraught "Sharon" , and KiKi Layne's "Tish" really do impress at times, but that just isn't enough to compensate for the verbose, glacial pace of the film and I'm afraid it left me rather underwhelmed.