Miss Juneteenth (2020)

(On Cable TV, February 2021) I’m not going to go on at length about Miss Juneteenth — I get the strong feeling that it’s not a film for me, nor should anything I have to say about it be worth more than a moment’s amusement. Still unusually enough for 2020, writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’s film is about black mothers and daughters, spanning generations and expectations. It’s nominally about a young black teenager being reluctantly drafted in the local “Miss Juneteenth” pageant by her mom, a past winner eager to live vicariously through her daughter after her own life took a less than triumphant turn. But it’s also about the relationship between the mom and her mom, a matriarch used to getting her way. It’s about reciting Maya Angelou, and a look at a tight-knit black community and all sorts of things that still feel fresh and unusual in today’s cinema landscape. In keeping with the past few years in Hollywood history, it’s a clear example of what happens when you trust filmmakers from different backgrounds to tell their own stories rather than the very narrow demographic of people who directed Hollywood films for decades. Miss Juneteenth has nothing specifically for me, and that’s good — I’m happy just listening in.