Medicine for Melancholy Saw Barry Jenkins Hit The Ground Running As An Exceptional Filmmaker

Barry Jenkins is best known today for directing two of the best movies of the 2010s, Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, but those weren't his first two forays into the world of feature film filmmaking. Prior to those two outstanding features, in 2009, he directed a small indie feature entitled Medicine for Melancholy that saw Jenkins channeling his inner Agnes Varda and Richard Linklater in telling a story about two people just spending a day together walking around a city and exchanging dialogue. Watching the film now, it's interesting to see how various parts of Medicine for Melancholy compare to his subsequent directorial efforts, with individual elements of the movie coming off as direct precursors to Jenkins' future directorial work.


Taking place in San Francisco, Medicine for Melancholy opens with Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Higgins) waking up from a one-night stand, with neither of them remembering much of anything about one another. At the insistence of Jo, the two decide to part ways forever, but Micah returning Jo her purse ends up ensuring that they end up seeing each other again. Before you know it, they're spending the rest of the day visiting the sights of the city and getting to know each other better. Their conversations reveal Micah's displeasures with the state of San Francisco in the modern world, especially in terms of gentrification that threatens the cities oldest residents.

If there's a primary crack in Medicine for Melancholy's armor, it's that it feels like Jo should have a more defined personality to her name. Through her conversations with Micah, we know she stands in opposition to many ideas or stances he brings up, but the problem is that's basically all we know about her is how she relates to Micah's perspective rather than what kind of perspective she has for herself. Jo's more restrained approach to her personality appears to be an intentional choice in the writing since the character is trying to ensure that she doesn't get too emotionally entangled with Micah, but I kept waiting for her extensive dialogue exchanges with Micah to really unearth new layers to a lead character that's never explored to a profound degree.

Thankfully, Tracey Higgins still delivers a solid performance in the part of Jo that helps compensate for her lack of defined personality and her chemistry with Wyatt Cenac is extremely interesting to parse out. Instead of the two characters sharing a smooth rapport indicating that they're meant for one another, Higgins and Cenac have an intentionally fractured dynamic in their chemistry that see's them alternating from effortlessly bouncing off each other one moment to barely being able to carry on a conversation another moment. It's a dynamic meant to reflect how these two characters are still so unfamiliar with each other and both performers execute it beautifully.

Both Higgins and Cenac are captured in cinematography that minimizes much of the color in nearly every frame to almost black-and-white levels, only bright colors in the characters clothes tend to pop with visual vibrancy. It's an unexpected decision for Medicine for Melancholy given how cinematographer James Laxton would put bright colors to great atmospheric use in his future collaborations with Barry Jenkins. Though a departure from his normal work with Jenkins, as executed here, Laxton's cinematography is one that totally works for the story of Medicine for Melancholy, like the imperfect chemistry between the lead actors, the lack of dreamy color emphasizes how this is a rougher, more imperfect tale of romantic infatuation.

Much like Laxton, Barry Jenkins also shows off skills in Medicine for Melancholy that, in the context of history, feel like antecedents for what would be seen in his future directorial efforts. This is most notably seen in a sequence where Jo and Micah ride a carousel together. This is one of the few scenes in Medicine for Melancholy that eschews reality in favor of visually and auditorily conveying the sensation of feeling romantically attracted to someone. Previously, the hustle and bustle of San Francisco has been an inescapable presence wherever Jo and Micah go, its presence being especially discernable since the score has been more muted to allow the noisy chaos of this city to be always heard.

But as these two characters ride a carousel together, suddenly, sound effects from the real world vanish as a particularly sweeping portion of the score by Mondo Boys instead takes over. In this moment of bliss, there's just these two characters together and the more intimate nature of this scene is reinforced by pieces of camerawork that place importance on just shots of the character faces, there's nary a wide shot to be found here. From its music choices to how it's directed and filmed, this is an intoxicating sequence that beautifully captures the first real spark of a romantic connection between Micah and Jo. Another first it captures is the first time Barry Jenkins managed to tenderly capture human beings, even in the face of an overwhelming outside world, managing to connect with one another on a romantic level. In Medicine for Melancholy, one can see the first time Barry Jenkins masterfully achieved this feat and knowing what kind of works he'd directed in the decade since Medicine for Melancholy was released, it certainly wouldn't be the last time he pulled this off!