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Miss Juneteenth Movie Review

Miss Juneteenth is a 2020 drama film directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples and starring Nicole Beharie. It’s a flawed, but sweet flick.

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“Stop worrying about them. You look good“

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A former beauty queen and single mom prepares her rebellious teenage daughter for the “Miss Juneteenth” pageant. Apparently, this pageant was going on for over a century, in fact just after slavery was abolished in America was the start of this annual tradition. The movie is insightful in portraying the importance of this pageant while also emphasizing its negative aspects such as the many excesses in clothing.

The heart of the movie is the mother-daughter relationship. Turquoise (such a weird name) and Kai are both wonderfully developed and their conflict was well realized, but simply the love that was there was wonderful to witness and the two felt like genuine, real human beings. Both performances are very strong with Nicole Beharie being particularly terrific. She’s very believable and her naturalistic performance was great to witness.

Unfortunately, all the other characters were really not good. The problem here isn’t just the characterization, which was just too weak for all the supporting players, but the strong emphasis on these people was an even bigger problem.

When you have such a strong mother-daughter relationship at the core of the movie, why the need to add all these other uninteresting people and emphasize so heavily on them? The result is a mess of a movie. All those scenes ground its pace to a halt, which was unfortunate as it could have been so much better had they developed them and their stories more.

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Miss Juneteenth also features a weak, dull dialogue in those sections, but again the two central female characters have many great lines of dialogue and many very moving scenes between them. The movie is well shot, solidly directed, but weakly paced. I loved that ending. It was unexpected and different, but unfortunately everything that came before it was overly familiar. The movie needed more such brilliant and daring scenes to counteract all the standard drama.