It makes sense that the very best of “Miss Juneteenth” seems to emanate from the warm, but unflappable gaze of Nicole Beharie. Even though the new film from director and writer Channing Godfrey Peoples features the 2019 Miss Juneteenth teenage pageant in Fort Worth, Texas, the title is really talking about the past when Beharie’s Turquoise Jones won the coveted title a decade and a half ago. She may not be the reigning queen, but it’s the accomplishment her life revolves around.
The film’s insistent yearning for the past is more subtle than one might imagine, though. Beyond a very brief wordless scene, all we see of Turquoise in her days of crowned glory are pictures. That’s part of the point. Years ago, Turquoise won the title – and a scholarship to a HBCU. The prize was a sign that she might make something of her life despite an unhelpful, alcoholic mother. But in 2019, all she has to show for it is a teenaged daughter she can’t communicate with, a not-quite-husband who waltzes in and out of her life, a mother she cannot depend on and a job that is more exhausting than rewarding. Yet, hope springs eternal. And Turquoise is adamant that this pageant will be the way for her daughter, Kai, to lift herself out of a potential hopeless future. Kai is less convinced.
Despite the wideness of the name, the story is quite specific. A brief sequence in the film explains Juneteenth, the day when slaves in Texas were finally informed of their freedom – two years after it officially ended. But Peoples is crafting a character study of great specificity rather than working towards a coherent examination of race in America. This is not a demerit. What’s most valuable about “Miss Juneteenth,” which reinforces then subverts our notions of a film like this is, is the way it offers a specific kind of black experience onscreen. This is a story that emphasises its smallness of focus.
This is, after all, a pageant film. There’s much more at work here than the pageant, but Turquoise’s dogged commitment to ensuring Kai participates in the pageant is the widest arc, which intersects with everything. The arc is not an unusual one. In this way it recognises how pageant films share DNA with sports films. And the competition narrative of a parent living through their child is a well examined basin of inspiration. In that way, the things that occur in “Miss Juneteenth” are rarely unusual or surprising and they look inward at the characters here rather than making a larger statement about the world. But more than surprising, what becomes valuable and effective is the way the softness of its characterisation and the specificity of Beharie’s performance illuminates a perspective of a particular kind of poor, black character that is not always granted the dignity and grace of this kind of character study.
The attention to detail in the way the film looks is critical. American cinema still suffers from the ways it avoids interrogating poverty on screen that is not fanciful or condescending. “Miss Juneteenth” details the idea of a poor family with great care. This is a world that Peoples has thought about and considered, and even as the story itself is a familiar one, that story in this world is immediately significant. Even better, in Beharie’s performance, Peoples has found a collaborator for the ages.
Beharie is so in tune with the nuances of the film, that she avoids any entrapments of banality in her performance. People’s camera is most confident when it allows Beharie’s face to envelope the frame and react to things around. And even if the plot developments in “Miss Juneteenth” do not surprise, the way Beharie’s Turquoise responds to the world around is always more complex than the rote. So, like in any sports movie, much of what Beharie is tasked with as the film reaches its (very low-key) climax is simply responding. It’s the question of turning stillness into something that is seismic on screen, and in the requisite moment where Turquoise sees her daughter onstage and really sees her for the first time, as her own person, Beharie’s eyes tell a story in twenty seconds that feel like the natural fulcrum of the film.
The fact that the film around her is more modest than radical feels like a necessity. Or, more accurately, the tenderness of every frame – even, and especially, the generic portions – makes any hard-line criticism of them feel ungenerous. There is goodness here beyond Beharie, for example. Kendrick Sampson is good opposite Beharie as Kai’s father. Phyllis Cicero is piercing in a brief role as a pageant coordinator. There are the requisite moments with the rival parent who Turquoise has a past with. The scenes with Turquoise’s mother which briefly illuminate a history of crisis. Kai’s scenes with a potential romantic beau are less assured. Better, but more complicated is the accidental love triangle Turquoise ends up in with her on-and-off again husband and a childhood friend. But “Miss Juneteenth” film subverts the biggest potential issues by recognising that this is a story of a woman more than it is about the people around her. In a moment of resolute clarity, Beharie utters a line of such profundity, “I just want something for myself.”
That line, in a way, nods to the central import of a film like “Miss Juneteenth”. Its eyes are focused on Turquoise’s specific story, but by giving this story a chance to exist it reminds us of the way her specific story resonates for so many black women worldwide. This is not a story of all black women, but Peoples is shrewd enough about her observations to recognise the ways that Turquoise’s story is one that challenges us to recognise the ways that black women are failed by the world around them. The film’s gently hopeful ending is made more nuanced when Peoples avoids resolutions and opts instead for something like the whisper of a possibility.
Miss Juneteenth is available for rent or purchasing on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes and Vudu.
