Post by Dracula on Jul 15, 2023 8:53:43 GMT -5
You People(3/21/2023)
We all remember Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the seminal 1967s comedy in which a white woman reveals to her parents that her finance is a black man, but what if the roles were reversed and they wanted to do a story in which a black woman reveals to her parents that her fiancé is a white man? Well good news, there’s a movie about that as well, it was called Guess Who and it came out in 2005 starring Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, and Zoë Saldaña and it’s not very well remembered. But okay, a lot has happened since then, what if we wanted to make a movie about interracial relationships that has more modern sensibilities and is maybe a bit harder on the cringey condescending white liberal parents? Well, that exists to and it’s called Get Out. But okay, what if you wanted to combine the modern take on cringey boomer liberal parents while also doing the racial role reversal idea of making it about a white man with a black woman and also want to do it as a straightforward comedy without horror elements… well, I guess the new film You People is for you then. It stars Jonah Hill as a thirty something dude who runs a podcast about “the culture” who meets a woman played by Lauren London and eventually asks her to marry him, but the meeting of the parents on both sides becomes kind of a nightmare. The black woman’s father, played by Eddie Murphy, is in the Nation of Islam and has very little patience for this schlubby underachieving caucasian who wants to join the family. Meanwhile the white guy’s mother, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is this deeply cringey rich lady who gets diarrhea of the mouth whenever in the presence of African Americans.
This was funded by Netflix, but it doesn’t have the look and feel of a Netflix release necessarily. It’s no one’s idea of a visual marvel but it does for better or worse look like what you would have expected from a theatrical comedy from roughly 2005-2013, you know, back when comedies were still allowed to have theatrical releases. I will also say that the film is pretty effective at capturing the very specific brand of cringey social awkwardness that arises when clueless white people interact with fed up black people in the 2020s… in fact it might be a little too effective at it. Some of these interactions are so intensely intentionally cringe inducing that it’s almost hard to laugh at them because you’re being hit by too much second hand embarrassment for all these characters. On the not-so-positive end of things, I think Eddie Murphy was kind of miscast here. Murphy is known for being smooth and mischievous, not grumpy, and this character is supposed to be grumpy as hell. I think maybe at some point they re-worked the character to be less of an “angry black man” stereotype but I’m not sure they ever landed on what the replacement for that was supposed to be because the character we’re left with doesn’t quite work comedically. In fact I got “re-worked in post” vibes form a lot of the movie as there are a handful of characters here that seem to be introduced only to not really be used elsewhere or they sort of show up out of nowhere later without having gotten a proper introduction.
But I think the bigger problem here is just that the central romance between the Jonah Hill and Lauren London characters really just doesn’t work. Hill has that “schlubby guy feels mismatched to attractive co-star problem that a lot of movies get criticized for and even if you look past that these actors just don’t have chemistry and I didn’t buy this relationship, which is kind of a problem because its critical to propelling this movie. So that’s a big problem, but I wouldn’t say the whole movie is a waste as there are parts of it that really do work. Julia Louis-Dreyfus does a great job of capturing everything that’s annoying and clueless about over-privileged white womanhood and some of the side cast members like Sam Jay and Deon Cole do some good work here. There are funny moments along the way, but the movie ultimately feels ramshackle and not always in a charming way, but we don’t get a lot of comedies like this so I don’t want to be too hard on it even if there are enough drawbacks here that I don’t know that I can really get behind the project as a whole.
*** out of Five
