Get Out review

Keagan Michael Key and Jordan Peele rose to prominence by using their comedic platform to discuss issues of race, sociology and identity, but Peele’s treatment of these topics as the basis of a mostly-serious horror film has added an urgency and anger that wasn’t always present in their Comedy Central show. With the election coming fresh off the outrage surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement and having recently seen many young black men killed by the authorities, churches burned down and minority voting rights being compromised, this retrograde of civil rights has had an emotional and psychological impact on many non-white communities. 

“Get Out” takes the basic structure of the 1967 Sidney Poitier film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and subverts it with the sci-fi-horror paranoia of classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” 

Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris Washington, the young African American boyfriend of Rose Armitage, played “Girls” star Allison Williams. They’ve been dating for five months and Chris has decided travel with his gal to upstate New York to meet her white, affluent, town-and-country family for the first time. While nervous about the encounter, everything seems to be relatively normal. Rose’s neurosurgeon dad (Bradley Whitford) clumsily tries to code-switch, speaking in what he thinks of as ‘street’ lingo, and is perhaps too quick to assure Chris that if he could have voted for Obama for a third term, he would have.  And while Rose’s hypnotherapist mother (Catherine Keener) is a little too insistent on helping Chris shed his smoking habits with a free session, basically, the two parents seem warm and accommodating. On the other hand, Rose’s MMA-obsessed brother (Caleb Landry Jones) displays an intensity that’s a little less predictable.

Things only begin to get especially strange when Chris approaches the family’s African American hired help, Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel). They’re awake and active at weird hours of the night, they walk around dazed and unresponsive and they’re hostile or defensive whenever Chris tries to engage them in conversation. As the story unfolds and plot points are later revealed, Peele’s script continues to take bigger, wilder risks and digs deep into the overt social commentary that permeates the film’s subtext.

It might have been very tempting to portray the devious whites here as post-colonial, traditional conservatives from the south, but the movie instead chooses to tap into a much less obvious stereotype; upper-middle-class, educated neo-liberals. Peele examines the often-parasitic relationship between the races, and how some classes of whites will co-opt the struggle of the black experience for their own political or monetary gain, without ever giving back to the communities they exploit to successfully take power.

The movie brilliantly and thoroughly eases the audience into Chris’s perspective so that we are looking at every white character with as much suspicion as he is. When the privileged guests off the parent’s snooty garden party ask stupid questions like “what’s the African American experience been like for you,” even a white audience can feel the sting of condescension in that moment. Peele’s immersive subjective direction along with Kaluuya’s nuanced performance helps to sell what, stripped away from its political context, could come off as fairly goofy genre material.

“Get Out” is a step further away from the broad sketch comedy of “Key and Peele,” but it also provides many well-earned laughs of its own. LilRey Howery is cleverly placed as Chris’s best friend character Rod, working within the story as the audience’s cipher. Through jokey conversations with the protagonist, this character points out the inherent pulpiness of the plot and reminds us that this director understands and has a sense of humor regarding the horror/thriller traditions he’s working in. Nevertheless, when the rubber needs to hit the road Peele fully commits to his thought provoking thesis and allows his racial allegories to approach their brutal conclusions.

Grade: A 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2017

Keanu review

Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele have been responsible for a smart and topical breed of socially aware comedy since their days as cast members on the now-defunct sketch comedy show Mad TV. Later, on their eponymously named Comedy Central sketch show “Key and Peele,” they were given the means and freedom to bring their ideas about race, identity, and class to the forefront, with a poignancy that elevated their knack for quotable line-delivery, over-the-top characters and impressive production values.  Now, with their first movie as a duo, “Keanu,” they’ve ported over a lot of the qualities that people expect and appreciate from their brand of humor but not without some noticeable growing-pains as they transition into feature filmmaking.

“Keanu” straddles the line between incisive satire and stoner zaniness and sometimes loses itself in the mediation of both attempts. In what’s the pretty basic framework of a plot—dorky suburban cousins have to pretend to be tough to get a kitten back from a neighboring Los Angeles gang—this premise allows for the duo to further explore their interest in themes such as racial identity, code-switching and the pressure African Americans have to perform masculinity in certain ways.  In the opening of the film we see Jordan Peele’s Rell as a sad-sack lay-about photographer who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend. Posters of famous gangster flicks such as “Heat” and “New Jack City” line his apartment walls. His cousin Clarence (Key) is an uptight corporate team builder and is currently being pressured by his wife to toughen up and break a few rules, as his carefulness is an apparent turn-off. It’s these character traits that are subverted through the film as the characters encounter a real gang leader named Cheddar (Method Man) and infiltrate his group of hard killers, taking to the streets to sling a new party drug.  

Did I also mention the movie’s MacGuffin is an adorable tabby kitten, who, at one point, wears an adorable gold chain and a tiny, adorable do-rag? The kitten is in stark contrast to the hyper-masculine world these gangsters inhabit, as well as the film’s many Jon Woo inspired shoot-outs.  These sorts juxtapositions makeup the screenplay’s comedic engine. Another version of this inversion is the George Michael soundtrack and the many jokes surrounding Clarence’s unabashed love of the famously-out-gay, pop-star of the ‘80s. In a one of the more successful comedy set-pieces, Clarence convinces his new gangster brethren that George Michael is a light-skinned thug who offed his former Wham! partner before embarking on his solo-career. This is crosscut between a downright nerve-racking scene where Rell is caught in a sleazy Hollywood hotel room where drug-deal just gone horribly wrong. This back and forth between the world of the white and the world of black and what is seen as acceptable masculinity and what as seen as weakness is at the heart of what makes this comedy mostly work. Where things fall apart is in the vagueness of the characters as they’re written.

Much of the movie only works as a premise, much like sketch. We know Clarence is a corporate dork and his wife wants him to act stronger only because we are told so in a few bits of brief dialogue before the plot quickly progresses beyond that. Likewise, Rell’s fascination with gangster movies and hard-life as a fantasy is also never explicitly defined. Because their characters are more archetypal their arcs within the story are sometimes difficult to track and the jokes often rely on easy visual gags to make up for the lack of specificity within the script. As the movie stomps through its plot the action-film parody aspect begins to swallow-up the tone, resulting in long stretches of screen time were things become more manic than funny.

While “Keanu” is a commendable effort and entertaining on a base-level, it’s overall impression is slight when stacked against its thematic goals. Key and Peele’s comedic chemistry and the film’s few comedic eccentricities help to keep things light and bouncy and the movie serves as a satisfying distraction, but I can’t help but see through to the smarter, edgier satire that’s begging to break through.    

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Keanu"