GET OUT, BUT MAKE IT FANTASY
‘You People’ Film Review by Jules Crosby
In 2017, Jordan Peele recontextualized the set-up of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and imbued the comedic narrative with his own horror sensibility in Get Out. The feature received critical acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 90th Academy Awards. Peele broke the mold of traditional films with an interracial couple at the center, extending a conversation about race relations beyond formulaic conversations and stereotypical representations. “The sunken place”— a pseudo-purgatory in Get Out’s established universe— became a revolutionary and subtextual metaphor for slavery and oppression. As Peele said in a Twitter post from March 2017, “the sunken place means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” Get Out examines the complex reality of interracial marriage in a post-Trumpian American society, whereas Kenya Barris’ You People (2023) lodges itself in the delusion of a post-racial America: an America that does not exist.
You People, the romantic comedy co-written and directed by Barris, refuses to expand its narrative outside the parameters established by Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. And while You People modernizes itself with cringe-inducing Gen Z dialogue, music and fashion, the film remains a hollow remake of the 1967 picture. There is no attempt to give this movie its own distinct voice. The representation feels plastic, the central romantic relationship feels forced and as a result, the movie perpetuates a false reality surrounding the dynamics of interracial relationships (both romantic and platonic).
If “I don’t see race” enthusiasts sat down and wrote a movie, the product would be similar to Barris’ You People. The movie predicates itself on the paradox of diversity. It’s self- aware of the tension between white and Black folk but reduces that conversation to comedy bits around a dinner table over anything substantial. And the grand solution to petty discrimination on both sides comes with simple apologies by the final act— a cheap band-aid on massive, systemic issues addressed in the film including antisemitism and police brutality. In a movie that prides itself on the “color-blindness” of true romantic love, Barris manages to reduce the intricacy of race to charged, oversimplified visual identifiers: whether it is the Jordans on Ezra’s (Jonah Hill) feet that suggests he’s “woke,” Akbar’s (Eddie Murphy) “Fred Hampton Was Murdered” shirt, Amira’s (Lauren London) braids, or even the inclusion of Jewish Yamakahs and Muslim Kufis. The analysis on race in this film is built exclusively around visual perception, which keeps it from ever making any commentary beyond a surface level.
The film further posits Black and white people into polarized binary extremes. Amira’s Blackness is perceived as digestible whereas Akbar is defined by his militant and aggressive behavior. I could draft another paper on the not-so-subtle colorism interwoven in this tired typecasting, but it’s a documented pattern of Kenya Barris at this rate. It’s the same with the Jewish family. Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is the ditzy casual racist, but her daughter Liza (Molly Gordon) is the quintessential Gen-Z liberal white girl. The film relies on the overly reductive “negative” and “positive” representations of people, missing the breadth of human experience that exists within those two binaries and rendering all of the characters with no real dimensionality. Barris and Hill set out to write characters they can simply mark, assign and classify in their own boxes. And on top of that, they expect “positive” representations to displace the “negative” ones. The bigger issue presented in this film’s script are the rudimentary metrics used to gauge the value of marginalized people– as if the righteous folks are the only ones deserving of good stories. My point being, we are never thought to question the context from which Akbar’s character develops his beliefs, but rather hope he will “come around” and “open his heart” to his future son-in-law. The same son-in-law that profits off a podcast about “the culture”. Akbar’s culture, at that. Is that fair?
Characters in You People exist as nothing more than basic tropes on one side or the other. In fact, this film does a whole lot of “othering”. By the end of the third act, despite the wedding, the white v. Black rhetoric persists. It’s always us v. them; the spectacle of “the other '' continues. And it’s exhausting.
Barris’ inclination to reduce characters into stereotypes flattens this comedy, and it’s a shame because it really does have an all-star cast. In fact, it’s hard to call You People a pure comedy when elements of the film feel so fantastical. The happy ending makes no feasible sense, but for some spectators, will evoke tears and allude to the end of racism as we know it. Some might even stand and clap as the credits roll. That’s what plastic (ie: performative) representation does. But my Black ass does not buy it. The conclusion of the movie– and everything leading up to it– isn’t rooted in anything real. It is as fake as Emerald City. I would argue that You People could’ve been the next Get Out if it purged itself of the comedic elements and leaned into another genre entirely: fantasy.
