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Hit Thriller Get Out Makes Social Commentary Fun
A young black man walks through a still, upper-middle class suburban neighborhood at night. Hopelessly lost in the sameness of the streets, he mutters about the lousy directions he was given. Noticing a car following him, he keeps his head down and keeps moving. The car pulls over ahead of him; he turns the other way, not wanting any conflict. Without warning, he’s hit from behind, tossed into the trunk, and the car speeds off.
The opening scene demonstrates that Get Out is a thriller, not the comedy that writer and first-time director Jordan Peele is most known for. He’s half of the hilarious sketch duo Key & Peele, but has a lifetime obsession with the horror genre. This isn’t the gorefest of Evil Dead or Saw; think more Stepford Wives or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The movie cuts to an interracial couple relaxing in their Brooklyn loft. Photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is about to meet the parents of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) at their secluded estate. “Do they know I’m black?” he asks. She tells him not to worry. Her dad “would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could.” Her folks aren’t those kind of white people; they’re down with the struggle.
Meeting the parents subjects Chris to all kinds of awkward “post-racial” gaffes. “How you doin’, my man,” Dean (Bradley Whitford) says as he gives Chris a bro hug. “How long has this thang been goin’ on?” Dad’s a neurosurgeon while Mom (Catherine Keener as Missy) is a psychiatrist. But what’s the deal with their odd black servants? Groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and maid Georgina (Betty Gabriel) talk and dress like ’50s throwbacks, at least when they aren’t verging on a mental breakdown.
Racial issues remain at the center of Get Out, but the message is by no means black and white. Every major white character is a upscale liberal, clumsily reassuring Chris that they are woke, in the parlance of the day. You can picture each enthusiastically condemning white privilege as they point to the “I’m With Her” sticker on their hybrid. Though filmed in Alabama, rednecks and pickup trucks are nowhere to be found. In this posh exurb, deplorables would be as out of place as a Klansman at a Whole Foods.
I won’t say more about the plot, since the movie is a journey and spoilers will kill the ride. Peele tosses in a pair of jump-scares, but primarily builds tension through sharp, unexpected turns. Being ADHD, I’m used to checking my watch every 10 minutes to gauge how much movie is left. In Get Out, every nine minutes delivered a twist; I couldn’t get comfortable enough to take my eyes off the screen.
The unsung hero might be the casting director since every performance is remarkable. And I can’t leave out LilRel Howery, who provides much-needed comedic relief as Chris’s TSA buddy, Rod.
Get Out is a movie you’ll think about for days and will generate academic dissertations for years. But as a film made for $4.5 million that generated $30.5 million in its opening weekend, it fulfills the goals of every popcorn flick: It’s entertaining, a lot of fun, and pushes the viewer to tell everyone they know to go see it. Much like I’m doing here.
Published in Entertainment
Looking forward to this, and more non-traditional wokeness from all People of Color about where they actually fit into Liberalism. For now, the best Key & Peele clip of all time.
My take: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/445256/get-out
JLock: as a BYU grad, I endorse that clip. I LOLed.
They made this just for you then:
https://youtu.be/7N8xwXUk_bY?t=177
My daughter plays college basketball. She went with her team to go see this movie last night – says the theater was packed and she was nearly the only white person in the theater. My daughter said the movie was a steaming pile of vicious racism against whites, although her teammates loved it – “THAT’S why I won’t date white guys!!!” and so on. One of her teammates sort of apologized to my daughter about the blatant racism of the comments amongst her teammates on the way home. But her teammates saw this movie as a validation of the evil of white people.
I’ve seen the movie praised for it’s courage in its handling of sensitive issues. Perhaps. But I would be more impressed with their courage if they made a movie that tried to validate the evil of black people. That would be equally as stupid and wrong as this version, but that would at least be courageous. Criticizing white people is not exactly cutting edge stuff in our society right now.
College campuses are hotbeds of racial tension right now, and the girls may have missed the point of the movie because of their heightened sensitivities. I don’t know – I haven’t seen it. But my kid thought it was just racist propaganda.
The funny thing is locals know BYU marrieds tend to name their kids ridiculous things. A recent Studio C skit made fun of this with a girl named “Abcde,” pronounced “Absedee.” The joke after the Brexit vote last year was that someone in Provo was saying to themselves, “That would make a strong boy name.”
I was a roadie for three errant years in my youth — and spent many a-mornin’ (my phone wanted to correct that to Mormon) in the promised land of Salt Lake. Half drunk on near-beer, watching the Sun rise from vermillion birth, next to some dude with two monosyllabic first names delve into parable about the semantic meaning behind the Golden Plates — all to justify the reasons we struck out with women.
God Bless the Mormons and Utah. Truly a magical place.
One reason I wrote this review is because I saw several progressive think-pieces saying the same: Whitey is evil, Trump-era America is racist, etc., etc. Those interpretations seemed totally bizarre.
I didn’t get that at all from the movie. As I noted, every bad character was a upper-middle class white liberal. When Hollywood wants to invoke racism, it’s always a southern GOPer waving a confederate flag. Instead, this showed the hypocrisy of limousine liberalism that conservatives always make fun of.
I saw it in a theater filled with mostly white folks who applauded as the credits rolled. I’m disappointed that your daughter’s teammates reacted the way they did — maybe going in with the baggage of the modern academy created a different response. The message I got from the film was how white leftists view blacks as a group to use and “take care of” rather than as equal individuals. (Maybe that was my baggage speaking.)
But this movie was neither preachy (shocking for today’s Hollywood) nor was it political. I thought it made fascinating points about race with subtlety and charm.
I just saw this and loved it. To me, it was satirizing the race exploitation of the left, who fetishize minorities to such an extent that they feel total ownership over them, inside and out. Brilliant. And hilarious.