Review: Medicine for Melancholy

Medicine for Melancholy is a french-braided triptych of progressive themes.

Medicine for Melancholy
Photo: IFC Films

In the manner characteristic of low-budget “issue” films, writer-director Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy is a triptych of progressive themes—reluctant romance, race, and urban displacement—interwoven by the circuitous gab of an unremarkable but authentic two-person cast. Each of these three topics is given its own compartmentalized narrative thread, but unlike with other multi-layered works of metropolitan malaise (like The Visitor), all three of the socio-humanist plotlines uniformly fail along with the leads’ addled relationship.

At dawn, African-American bedfellows Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins) retrace the inebriated, hormonal footsteps of an impromptu one-night stand with humiliating ignorance. Jo resists Micah’s sober advances but Micah continues hounding, suffering from the misconception that their accidental sex possessed a germ of meaning. Biographical details begin to emerge. Micah lives in San Francisco’s modest but colorful Tenderloin district, Jo in the affluent Marina with her presumably yuppy (and white) boyfriend. Micah balks at Jo’s lifestyle and her lack of ethnic fidelity, while Jo insists that Micah’s self-image is reductive. Somehow their garrulous dialectic inspires them to make love again. They cease to become individual characters and float into the hazardous waters of over-generalized worldview emblems.

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Jenkins’s attempts to represent San Francisco’s fractured identity with borderline caricature is admirable, but where are the Asians and Latinos that populate the city’s underbelly? As with Medicine for Melancholy’s overbearingly deliberate cinematography, the cast’s skin color is egregiously two-toned for an area this diversified (to suggest “Black” and “white” as the polar opposites of racial identity in a multi-ethnic metro area is a hopeless fantasy). And even disregarding the glaring demographic omissions, one wonders at the ease with which Micah—the quintessentially self-proclaimed “angry young Black man”—continually seduces Jo away from her vaguely fastidious and, again, white art curator lover. Jenkins depicts Micah as flawed but seems alarmingly drawn to his proud creed of separatism and anti-miscegenation.

The occasional moments of genuine beauty are unsurprisingly visual—one dolly shot drawing us into the meniscus of a 50-gallon aquarium hauntingly drips light—but the ubiquitous editorializing urges us to dismiss the scant poetic potential. During one odd scene we’re shown a group of young people bemoaning the proposed moratorium on rent control in the city, which they conclude would eradicate “everything [they] love about San Francisco overnight.” And yet afterward Jenkins abruptly shows us placid, moonlit streets bereft of homeless derelicts, graffiti, or dilapidation. Medicine for Melancholy is a dreamy postcard of San Francisco, ultimately just as repressive as Jo’s gentrified apartment. Examining the Ansel Adams-like cityscapes and Irving Penn-influenced portraiture one would never assume there was any cause for grumbling.

Score: 
 Cast: Wyatt Cenac, Tracey Heggins  Director: Barry Jenkins  Screenwriter: Barry Jenkins  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 87 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2008  Buy: Video

Joseph Jon Lanthier

Joseph Jon Lanthier is the director of What Should I Put in My Coffee? His writing has also appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal.

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