"Miss Juneteenth" has its heart in the right place, and I want nothing more than to be able to unequivocally recommend a movie directed by a black woman about the black experience in America. But the film can't shed an amateurish quality that prevents it from hitting its marks.
I fault the screenplay mostly, which is also the work of the film's director, Channing Godfrey Peoples. It spends a good 90% of its time depicting the life of a struggling mostly single mother (the father is in the picture, but not reliably) and her teenage daughter as a joyless grind, only to switch gears in the movie's last ten minutes to land on a happy ending in which all dramatic conflicts are resolved and everything's tied up with a nifty bow. The ending doesn't feel earned, since the screenplay doesn't adequately set it up, and the whole thing hits the viewer as being disingenuous. I appreciated the film's resistance to wallowing in a misery porn aesthetic, but I think it could have landed somewhere between despair and the Hallmark movie "everyone gets what she wants" ending that it gives us.
As a consolation for the film's weak script, it features a lovely performance by Nicole Beharie as the mom whose determination to give her daughter what she missed out on blinds her to what her daughter actually wants.
Grade: B
I fault the screenplay mostly, which is also the work of the film's director, Channing Godfrey Peoples. It spends a good 90% of its time depicting the life of a struggling mostly single mother (the father is in the picture, but not reliably) and her teenage daughter as a joyless grind, only to switch gears in the movie's last ten minutes to land on a happy ending in which all dramatic conflicts are resolved and everything's tied up with a nifty bow. The ending doesn't feel earned, since the screenplay doesn't adequately set it up, and the whole thing hits the viewer as being disingenuous. I appreciated the film's resistance to wallowing in a misery porn aesthetic, but I think it could have landed somewhere between despair and the Hallmark movie "everyone gets what she wants" ending that it gives us.
As a consolation for the film's weak script, it features a lovely performance by Nicole Beharie as the mom whose determination to give her daughter what she missed out on blinds her to what her daughter actually wants.
Grade: B