Meet the Parents By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan (October 2017) Get Out (2017) Directed by Jordan Peele
Like its spiritual grandmother The Stepford Wives, there’s an impressive and deeply thoughtful amount of social commentary in Get Out, including levels of social awkwardness, social injustice, and, eventually, a whole new definition of human rights violations. But, also like its spiritual grandmother, I don’t think there’s ever a point when you could call Get Out overbearing or preachy, and if you think it’s taking a side, maybe you haven’t yet figured out the argument. We are anchored strongly to our young hero Chris, the sufferer of a whole new kinda discrimination. He is our close friend, a good man, and we’re freaking worried about the guy.
Two-thirds of Get Out is about Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) feeling like a mysteriously threatened fish-out-of-water and in that capacity, there’s not one of us who can’t identify with him. Daniel Kaluuya gives an amazing performance, showing tenderness and tolerance when such things seem warranted, an understandable dose of “you’ve got to be kidding me” when things start to get weird, and finally, brains, fortitude and bravery when it counts.
Chris is a young, black photographer of solid talent who is dating a white woman, Rose. They have a great relationship, which we know not because they say so, but because the actors convince us. We love them as a couple. But he hasn’t met her parents yet, and this weekend is the Big Moment. She is certain that her parents won’t mind; he is freaked out because she hasn’t told them ahead of time that her boyfriend is black. Ooh, that’s uncomfortable, this feeling that alerting her parents about his race was a necessary caution, almost a warning.
The initial meeting between Chris, and Rose’s successful and rich parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), is a brilliant bit of film. Mom and Dad try so hard to convince Chris that they don’t have a problem with his color that it starts sounding like there is a problem anyway, and maybe having to try that damned hard means there must be a problem, somewhere deep down. “I would have voted for Obama for a third term,” assures Dad, as Rose had predicted he would, which may be true and which I would have too, but why bring it up then and there, apropos of nothing?
But look here, as nice as Mom and Dad are, they have two black servants, a groundskeeper and a housekeeper, and both of these people are seriously weird. When Chris tries to talk to them, the reactions he gets make him wonder not only about racism or classism but about plain-and-simple sanity. Things between Chris and Rose’s Mom and Dad still seem to be going all right. However, when Rose’s younger brother Jeremy appears in time for dinner, the conversation turns racially aggressive, and it makes us wonder: is the plainly unstable Jeremy speaking from his own viewpoints, or did he learn them there at home?
That night, Chris sneaks out for a cigarette and ends up being hypnotized, unwillingly, by Rose’s Mom, a psychotherapist who claims she can cure Chris of his smoking habit. That much is true, but there’s more to it, Mom’s medical ethics are highly strange and, er, unethical, and from this point on, nothing will be right or comfortable about this family weekend. A big party of family and
SLEEP! friends is coming over for a reunion. One after another they arrive, affluent, middle-aged white couples with a way of welcoming Chris by assessing him in strange and creepy tones. Their various (but all inappropriate) reactions to Chris are enough to drive the young man into the woods in terror and disbelief, where he hides until Rose comes looking for him, so he can tell her, “I’m leaving, with or without you.”
I simply can’t tell you any more than that. What happens from here on out is for you to discover on your own.
Director Peele has a sharp sense of humor which shows repeatedly in the film, and to our benefit, he teeters often on that fine edge: on one side, everything’s funny, and on the other side, funny slips into scary. You’ll feel it too, the grin on your face fading as you come to a full realization of what has just happened. Things that Chris is laughing off on Day One are freaking him out on Day Two, and we can’t even discuss Day Three.
THEY’RE STILL SMILING BECAUSE IT’S STILL DAY ONE. I feel there was a bit of misjudgment in the use of Chris’s friend Rod (LilRel Howery). He is comic relief as well as the dogsitter for Chris’s pet while Chris is away. He becomes a much-needed phone contact to the outside world for Chris, a sounding board for the weirdness that is creeping up. After a point, though, Rod’s slapstick and attitude felt out of place, and it began to hurt the mood of the film. Chris and Rod share a final conversation, after which Rod turns investigator. This story that we’ve really only seen from Chris’s viewpoint begins shifting back and forth between two stories: We’d be waking in a nightmare with Chris and then, suddenly, getting a bit of physical comedy and smack-talk from Rod, which isn’t bad so except that it breaks up the mood and suspense of Chris’s ordeal. Smarter, in my opinion, would have been to leave Chris stranded, without knowing what Rod was doing, or if Rod was even doing anything.
Because, have no doubt, Chris’s predicament is pretty awful. Any fellow viewers who have been saying, “This is interesting but it isn’t a horror movie,” up until this point will have to retract that statement. One of Get Out’s many beauties is that it is willing to take time, introduce characters, build suspense, and make us wonder for a little while if this is all simply a story about a fish-out-of-water overreacting thanks to paranoia sparked by all those other, differently-colored fishies stumbling awkwardly by. People are going to interpret Get Out in dozens of ways, praise it for its keen understanding and racial awareness, assign symbolism to its every moment, and that’s fine. But its greatest achievement is telling this story without ever losing its thrilling horror-movie vibe. Most of all, Get Out is crackerjack entertainment. Well done.