On The Last Black Man in San Francisco
…As I was walking, they tried to stop me They put up a sign that said: PRIVATE PROPERTY Well, on the back side, you know, it said nothing — So it must be that side was made for you and me.
-Sharon Jones
Blaring sunlight. A girl on her way to school, dressed in skirt and hair ribbons, squints up at a tall stranger. The stranger — a man in a mask — smiles down at her. He is wearing a rubber suit for handling radioactive materials, and has been assisting in the cleanup of a San Francisco beach. Now he stands on the sidewalk overlooking the beach, preparing to go back down to the waste.
For a moment, the two stare at one another, looking like a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting. It’s Ruby Bridges meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But then the little girl hurries up. She rushes past another man — part prophet, part protestor, all parts ham — perched on a soapbox, ranting about the pollution of the Bay. His audience consists of two men, sitting on large rocks across the street, waiting for a bus. One of these men wears a smart green sport coat, vintage shirt and slacks; the other wears a plaid jacket and black fisherman’s beanie. They watch the zealot wax frantic.
The man in the beanie wonders aloud: “Do you think he rehearses this in the morning? Or is it all improvised?”
His friend looks up from his sketchbook. “It has the spirit of improvisation.”
As he says this, this man, the one in the sport coat (his name is Monty, and he is played by the revelatory Jonathan Major), makes a note of the Soapbox Man — if not in his book, then in his mind. He tucks him away, a detail in the mosaic. The mosaic of this city. This city of absent people.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an overwhelming tribute to black Americans who find themselves displaced of a home that was never theirs to begin with. It focuses on Jimmie Fails (played by Jimmie Fails — an actor of magisterial calm and beauty), who is determined to reclaim the house he grew up in. Built by his grandfather and sold by his father years prior, the house is Jimmie’s only lasting tie to the days before gentrification forced out everyone in his neighborhood. When the current owners move, Jimmie and Monty squat in the house and go to work restoring it. But their time there is borrowed; eventually, they will have to leave, too. And Jimmie won’t allow that to happen.
Heart-wrenching though it may be, the futility of Jimmie’s endeavor is vindicated by its metaphysical guardian angel: the movie’s director, Joe Talbot. With this, his feature debut, Talbot has established himself as a uniquely brilliant figure in American cinema. Though white himself, he articulates a vision of black lives that lifts his subjects into a realm of cinematic grandeur. In the way that Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a safe space for its own tortured protagonist, Last Black Man becomes the very home that Jimmie so strives to possess. It couches him in warmth and compassion, affectionately casts an amber light upon his face. A viewer’s caress, a testimonial of unwavering love.
This energy is manifested within the film through Monty, a man completely unfazed by his lack of social conformity yet indebted to those around him for being the lifeblood of his art. Unapologetically graceful, a true aesthete, he is attached to Jimmie and observes him, channeling his friend’s nuance into drawings and plays. But he does this with everyone: no passing body eludes his intense eyes. Dressed like a man from old photographs, he literally treads in the shoes of black literary icons like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. He is an enigma of sensitivity, he adapts himself to whatever circumstances are at hand. He is affected by all. He bears witness. And he pays tribute.
There is so much to cherish in this movie: its stylistic devotion to old school theatricality; the unusual, moving, platonic coupling of Jimmie and Monty; Tichina Arnold, who demonstrates yet again her gorgeous generosity as a comic-dramatic actor; cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s wild tableaus and David Marks’ fluent, varied editing. In truth, it almost buckles under all this good; if Last Black Man suffers, it’s because it has a hard time sustaining its total romantic drive. When every frame is a masterpiece, there’s little opportunity for an audience to rest. It is possible for movies to say too much — to be too much. The sad truth is that a two-hour movie hasn’t necessarily the bones to wield plot or detail the way a novel does. The most successful movies are often the ones whose directors don’t stack their chips too high.
But there’s something to be said for those who do. While watching Last Black Man, I was reminded of The Magnificent Ambersons — another wistful movie set in an old family house, where declining legacies echo down elaborate arches and shadowy corridors. That was the second movie of Orson Welles, who ditched it before editing was through and allowed his studio to rip the project limb from limb. Welles’s creative mind was both perfectly suited to movies and too vast for them; it will be interesting to see if Joe Talbot maintains a similar level of virtuosity, or if he’ll scale down.
The feat of The Last Black Man in San Francisco is that it reflects its characters’ idealistic fervency with equal cinematic power. The movie really is its subjects. Given the unwieldy nature of both, whatever weaknesses the movie displays are forgivable. So long as Joe Talbot’s eccentricities directly service his work’s emotional core, he will be more or less in the clear. How I hope he stays there.
