Moonlight

Moonlight concludes at a cathartic moment: the camera closes in on Chiron comforted in loneliness by a lost love before cutting away to the visual of a smooth black head turning back to pierce the fourth wall, a dewey orb of darkness set against the moonlit seascape. The film's power is captured precisely in its conclusion as it provides no payoff, only the real succession and consequence of choices and mistakes made in a lifetime, plagued by an unyielding realism. This sentiment is echoed in its technical style. Moonlight takes the form of a series of moving moments that linger too long, a closeup that never relents, invading the audience with the harshness and helpless of every character's condition. It is a piece of cinema confirming substance to lie within the style, living in the music and the imagery, in the beauty of suggestion, nuance and interpretation. The dizzying concoction of grief, violence and torment, a carefully selected orchestra of events that culminate to an emotional climax where the film descends into a fever dream. Judgment blurs and characters act on whim and instinct and desire and the story is pushed into its next chapter. 

There is a quality of the unremarkable in Moonlight's intrinsic story. A young boy is neglected by his crackhead mother, bullied as a teenager, finds solace in lust and intimacy and as an adult is empty, lost and lonely. But herein lies the distinctive power of Moonlight: its essential character of humanness. There is push to develop its characters beyond their short name: the crackhead mother and hard drug dealer are not incapable but merely constrained in their ability to give Chiron the love and care he needs. The specificity and smallness of its story prove no bar to its reach and relevance. It is a piece of cinema delicate and profound in its soulful resolution.

Paterson

Paterson finds the tiny fragments of poetry which trickle through routine and rest in the crevices of ordinary life, swimming in the details of a particular place or person, hiding in patterns, in serendipity, and the largeness which affects the smallness of an individual. The feature evokes a stirring, patient kind of understated, suggesting there to be beauty found in rearranging the prosaic humdrum of mediocrity into pretty words, a sweet verse. The words written by Paterson (Adam Driver) are done so without a definable purpose. Paterson relishes in the pleasure of deconstructing his day to day with clunky metaphors and strangely profound prose. Every day is miles driven in a local bus blocks around a small town, strokes of a pen forming an ongoing love sonnet, and the patient words exchanged between a pensive man and his idiosyncratic, somewhat facetious lover.  

Paterson's poetry is far from exceptional, it is pure and unadulterated, tranquil, free from pretense or any forged grandeur but more often than not it lacks the elegance and sophistication of published work. This is verse quite plainly coming from an ostensibly content man who desires nothing more than what he already has, a fascinating concept given the dull, uneventful and routine nature of his existence. He rises early, but not before first cherishing a few moments in bed with the sleeping silhouette of his beautiful wife, eats alone, scribbles a few meditative lines at his driver seat before being interrupted to start work. Throughout his day, he finds time to set ink to his small book of poetry, he listens in to the snippets life he can steal from the conversations of his passengers and the fragments of community and drama he encounters at the dive bar he frequents.