Britell did not play the theme in a lower key, as he explained earlier this year to Song Exploder. When the piece returns in the second act-Chiron now several years older, looking no less deeply inhibited as he sits sullen in his high-school classroom-the key is pitched way down, from D major to B major.
The first piece in the film, bubbling up nearly 10 minutes in, is “Little’s Theme”-a gentle, vaguely mournful minute of piano and hushed violin that begins as young Chiron stares into his lap in the booth of a fast-food restaurant, keeping every thought and feeling submerged. “This shit ain’t too bad.” So Britell set out to write a score that would split the difference between classical and codeine. “You know what?” Jenkins recalls telling Britell.
They ran Mozart and Beethoven through Final Cut Pro and slowed them to a crawl to hear what it was like. (“Because how’s a guy from New York who went to Harvard gonna know what chopped and screwed music is?” Jenkins joked in an interview with Pitchfork late last year.) Britell’s introduction to the style was swift-and he told Jenkins he thought he could do something with it. Britell had never even heard of the technique. Jenkins had chopped and screwed orchestral music in mind before he knew it was possible. In fact, I propose the influence that looms over Moonlight most profoundly isn’t Wong Kar-wai, as has been suggested. And the stirring original score-delicate chamber music composed by Nicholas Britell for piano, violin, and cello-has been chopped and screwed in vintage Houston hip-hop fashion. The two cuts most pivotal to the action are Jidenna’s “Classic Man” and the “Laudate Dominum” from Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore. The soundtrack ranges from Aretha Franklin to Goodie Mob to Boris Gardiner and Prez P. More surprising is how Moonlight sounds-and the wildly different music that inspired it. The film’s visual models, derived mainly from international arthouse cinema and fine-art photography, are perhaps to be expected of a self-confessed cinephile with a very keen eye. Jenkins draws from a huge range of traditions, and what he yields is totally, ravishingly, his own. The combined effect is strikingly eclectic. Jenkins renders this plaintive coming-of-age drama with help from an arsenal of disparate inspirations: the slow-motion reveries of In the Mood for Love, the brawny homoerotic tension of Beau Travail, the radiant cobalt palette of Viviane Sassen’s beachside portraiture.
Moonlight tells the story of Chiron-black, gay, unwaveringly taciturn-as he advances in three tragic acts from viciously bullied adolescent (Alex Hibbert) to briefly self-discovering teen (Ashton Sanders) and, finally, to repressed and reinvented trapper (Trevante Rhodes) with a wounded, yearning soul. He sops up styles from all over and wrings out something marvelously new. But the Miami-born filmmaker’s cardinal talent is for synthesis, plainly. Certainly director Barry Jenkins has a personal vision, clear and true-and his lauded Best Picture winner is indeed rich in distinctive, highly original sounds and images, several already impressed upon the popular imagination. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Lucrecia Martel, Henry Roy, Carlos Reygadas, Charles Burnett, Edward Yang, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Kahlil Joseph, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wai: Moonlight is a film of many influences, most of them undisguised and unmistakable.