I do not usually watch romantic dramas, but I saw the preview for The Photograph right before Last Christmas. When asked if I would see it, I replied, “It is not my kind of movie, but everyone is just so pretty that I feel compelled to see it.” Plus it has a majority black cast, and a black woman directed it so why not make yet another exception, and see this film?
The Photograph is not my genre, and I was bored out of my mind, but the soundtrack and the cast were perfect. As I get older, I can suspend disbelief if you use the premise of the supernatural or a world filled with super powered people, but tell me that a black woman can move from Louisiana to Manhattan, find an affordable, spacious, freshly painted apartment, and I will complain that it is unrealistic. Where were the realtors saying that she needed to pay a fee, first and last month and a security deposit then still not finding a place? Where did she stay? How did she find out about and get the interview? Black people already living in Manhattan during the eighties were gradually being priced off the island—I know! So do not tell me that a struggling artist does not have roommates because you are a lie! Also you could be the best artist and still not make it.
Forget the romance, I wanted The Photograph to tell me the story of how working hard for another artist created enough generational wealth that her daughter, played by the luminous Issa Rae, could afford her own deluxe apartment. I have been out of the museum game for a long time, but do assistant curators and journalists make so much money that they can have apartments with so many large windows with beautiful views? This film should come with a warning, “Being a curator is more than looking beautiful, wearing beautiful clothes, attending elegant art and film openings in the evening and trading bon mots with the elite.” Maybe I am wrong. If a film is going to make me believe that she made it, I want to see the work. I know that is not why we are here, so I clearly came to the wrong place.
The point of The Photograph is to tell two stories of love and see if the lovers in the present can learn from the mistakes of the lovers from the past, which also helped bring them together. Lakeith Stanfield plays a journalist who becomes drawn to the titular object while doing a story in Louisiana then it draws him to Rae’s character in Manhattan where he works. Her mother, a famous photographer, is the subject. Call me a scrooge, but I kept asking myself why they hit it off and should be together? Other than them being really beautiful, I now understand why I will always be single. I hated the dialogue. Did they learn anything about each other that endeared them to the other as a person? We know that they are horrible at relationships, and they have spent extremely brief periods in their chosen professions, which seems to give them disproportionate amounts of autonomy and benefits. I almost feel as if this film should come with a disclaimer, “Kids, don’t try this at home. Life is not like this!” Hey, assistant curators with two years experience, are you singlehandedly creating exhibits?
Also I think that I generally hate movie and television depictions of journalists. I feel as if his original story was supposed to be about environmental pollution by big corporations and how it disproportionately affects communities of color then he becomes Carrie Bradshaw and admits to making it all about him and his love life. Also I understand on some level that the hurricane in Manhattan is supposed to symbolize how nature overwhelms them and throws them together, but it is also a sign of climate change, write the damn story! No, ok. I guess that the end of the world will be photogenic.
The Photograph is clearly not for me. Let me go watch Dark Waters again. Also I realized that the only romance that I wanted to see was between the journalist’s brother and his wife as they raise two adorable children in a brownstone, whom Rae’s character meets after sleeping with the journalist one time. Ummmmm, what? Do relationships work like that? They slept together one time, and they were talking about their relationship as if they had invested years. I’m conservative and old-fashioned, but I was thinking that neither of them owed the other that much of an explanation. Follow the married couple around please. They are goals!
Alternatively the stronger story in The Photograph seemed to be the generational problem of miscommunication between mothers and daughters. It was the most emotionally palpable moment on screen between Chante Adams and Marsha Stephanie Blake, who is a thespian and generally takes over every scene that she appears in Luce. Blake blows everyone away and gave the movie a visceral gravitas missing in all the other story lines. With a simple look, she could change the mood of the room.
Within the first five minutes of The Photograph, I guessed the plot twist, which logistically does not make sense if you think of the timing of everything that unfolds in the film.
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The photographer sleeps with the dude before leaving for three months. He gets married long after they sleep together, but his wife is showing, and she is not? How? OK maybe they do not show her body in those scenes, and maybe the wife was just wearing a loose dress, but come on. She just got a job, promised to work hard and is already taking time off for a funeral. Unless she worked for the government, I am fairly sure that she would not have that job for long, especially since artists are not necessarily known for their chill temperament with respect to their assistants. Also when she returns home with her daughter after four years, unless she owns the place, how is it still vacant? Where is Auntie Denise?
The Photograph just made me think about the logistics of life because the actual relationship and individuals in that relationship really are not fully developed characters, and the movie required that I suspend disbelief on aspects of life that I am entirely too familiar with: real estate in New York, the lives of artists. I do not mind that they are two young individuals trying to discover themselves, but I am at a stage in my life that I am less interested in the idea of a person than the actual details of a person, which is why I was more drawn to the relationships with a little meat on their bones-his brother and sister in law, the mother and daughter. I know that Rae and Stanfield are the bigger names, but the flashback love story felt more organic than the present. If Rae and Stanfield’s characters were real people, I would root for them just because they are so pretty to look at, but the whole thing seems ridiculous. The most loving moment in the film was when Isaac was making the dark room for Christina otherwise nada.