Instead, we get two underbaked movies for the price of one. The first is about Michael (Stanfield), a journalist for an online magazine. He\u2019s in New Orleans writing a story on hurricane victims (or possibly Louisiana riverboat fishermen, it\u2019s never actually specified). While visiting a source, Isaac (Rob Morgan of Just Mercy<\/em>), Michael finds some photos by a photographer named Christina, Isaac\u2019s old flame. Back in New York, Michael searches for more information on Christina, who somehow ties into this nebulous article he\u2019s writing, which put him in touch with the late woman\u2019s daughter, Mae (Rae), whom he immediately falls for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other<\/em>\nA-plot in The Photograph<\/em> is Mae\u2019s story,\nabout processing the recent death of her emotionally distant mother, Christina,\nand coming upon a pair of letters left by Christina for Mae and her father\n(Courtney B. Vance) regarding Christina\u2019s early life. The story switches\nbetween Mae and her growing relationship with Michael, and Christina\u2019s (Chant\u00e9\nAdams) adolescent relationship with Isaac (Y\u2019lan Noel).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each of these could easily be a fully-developed\nmovie of its own. Cut up and stuck back together as they are, the result is two\nfrustratingly incomplete ones. The\nPhotograph<\/em> should primarily be Mae\u2019s movie, which Meghie seems to finally\nfigure out in the third act, but her screenplay bafflingly spends most of its\nfirst act with Michael. Meghie digs into the details of his workplace and\nfamily relationships, while doing very little work to develop those same\ndetails for Mae \u2013 a major problem, since she\u2019s the source of most of the\nmovie\u2019s dramatic stakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That imbalance of character development also\nimpacts the performances of the leads. Stanfield and Rae manage to power the\nmiddle third of the movie through sheer force of charisma once their characters\nfinally get together, and the story belongs to them both equally. Until that\npoint, however, Rae is given very little to work with. The dialogue in her\nearly scenes, including her first meeting with Stanfield\u2019s Michael, is so\nwooden that you can practically hear the disappointment in Rae\u2019s voice as she\nsays it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nPhotograph<\/em> does manage to gain significant traction\nonce Mae and Michael\u2019s romance heats up, and is also lifted by some solid\nsupporting performances \u2013 particularly Lil Rel Howery and the too-rarely-seen\nTeyonah Parris as Michael\u2019s brother and sister-in-law. Unfortunately, the\nstrength and commitment of the performers isn\u2019t enough to fix bad writing.\nConflicts that should have been present at the beginning of the narrative are\nsuddenly introduced halfway through, piled on to a story that has enough going\non as it is. In all of it, we lose the character of Christina, and the thematic\nconnections between mother and daughter, almost completely. Meghie finally\ndecides to address that emotional throughline \u2013 what we\u2019ve been told is the\nmovie\u2019s biggest theme \u2013 in the final act, but before then it almost feels like\nan afterthought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Photograph<\/em> is a film without a focal point. There are several seeds of good ideas throughout, but they need room to grow. Jammed together in such a relatively brief (under two hour) span, the stories and characters can\u2019t connect the way they need to, ultimately doing a disservice to the cast\u2019s best efforts to keep the thing going. It\u2019s less a movie than it is a half-finished collage. The Photograph is a movie that feels needlessly unsure of the story it wants to tell. Stella Meghie’s romance is, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":13418,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[1098,162],"class_list":["post-13417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22903,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions\/22903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/photograph1.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nD+<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"