Get Out

GET OUT (Jordan Peele, 2017)

In GET OUT Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is right to be a little worried about meeting the parents of his his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). She’s not told them that he’s black, although Rose shrugs off his concern about his race mattering to her family. Things can be a little uncomfortable when they arrive at the private estate, but the tension is more because of Rose’s mom Missy (Catherine Keener) and dad Dean (Bradley Whitford) awkwardly conveying their ease rather than signaling objections to the interracial relationship. They even try to smooth over any wrong ideas Chris may get from spotting two black servants working in their home.

While there doesn’t appear to be any reason for alarm, the weekend gets weirder for Chris after Missy hypnotizes him to help him stop smoking. Chris and Rose have unknowingly come to the Armitage house when Missy and Dean throw an annual party, so he also feels out of place among a bunch of monied older white people. He’s relieved when he sees another young black man, Andrew Logan King (Lakeith Stanfield), in attendance, but his atypical behavior heightens the sense that something isn’t right.

With comedian Jordan Peele as writer and director, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that GET OUT might be a humorous update of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER. It’s been fifty years since the then-controversial movie about a white woman accompanied by her black fiancé paying a surprise visit to her liberal, upper-class parents. After all, a lot has changed in American society in the intervening time. While there are satirical and comedic elements to GET OUT, most notably with Lil Rel Howery as Chris’s suspicious friend, Peele guides the situation to play as horror. The monster of racism hasn’t disappeared; it’s just hidden itself better.

Peele has fun playing with appearances. Kaluuya goes to great pains to be agreeable as Chris. He doesn’t want to create a stir when a police officer presses him for his ID after they hit a deer even though he wasn’t driving. Rose pushes back strongly, calling out the demand for what it is, but her insistent response is also a function of the privilege she has because of her race. Chris would have every right to protest too, but the situation might not play out the same. Rose’s parents and the party guests overdo it in trying to show their enlightened viewpoints or interest so that their politeness is laced with offense. Chris’s amiable and unassuming behavior, which has helped him in code-switching until this situation, proves to be what makes him most vulnerable.

Peele’s directing debut displays a strong visual sensibility and a great amount of forethought. The way one character runs initially reads as a broad joke, yet it carries a larger meaning. There are numerous other examples that demonstrate the care with which seemingly insignificant details are pregnant with implications. GET OUT isn’t a scary movie in that it doesn’t induce armrest-gripping. Rather, the terror in it comes from perceiving the way Chris experiences the world differently from the white characters.

Grade: B

Begin Again

BEGIN AGAIN (John Carney, 2013)

When BEGIN AGAIN premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, it was called CAN A SONG SAVE YOUR LIFE? The melodramatic title has been changed to something more ordinary, yet writer-director John Carney still presses viewers to consider the question even if it is no longer the film’s name. The implied answer to the film’s previous title is yes, absolutely yes. While BEGIN AGAIN may come off as naïve and Pollyana-ish regarding the realities of the business side of music, its enthusiasm for the power of a song is hard to deny.

As in Carney’s film ONCE, the two main characters are brought together through music. Gretta (Keira Knightley) and Dan (Mark Ruffalo) are at low points in their lives when their paths cross. She’s fresh off leaving her longtime boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Adam Levine), whose first taste of success leads him to cheat on her. Dan is not coping well with the year-long separation from Miriam (Catherine Keener), his wife of eighteen years, and their teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld). Adding to his troubles, he gets fired from the independent record label he co-founded. Both are at a New York City club’s open mic night when Gretta’s friend Steve (James Corden) pesters her into taking the stage to play one of her songs. While the crowd doesn’t seem especially won over, Dan believes that he hears something special.

Thinking she may be his ticket to getting his job back, Dan approaches Gretta expecting to impress her with his position in the industry. At first she rejects his offer to mold her into another artist in the hit-making machine, but after a night of reflection Gretta decides that she has nothing to lose by auditioning for Dan’s former partner Saul (Mos Def). Although Saul declines to sign her, Dan is undeterred and proposes using a laptop to self-record an album with Gretta performing outside at locations around the city. Gretta values authenticity in music, so the idea of working on a passion project in this manner is irresistible.

BEGIN AGAIN understands the role music can play in daily life. It expresses one’s aggravations and happiness and can be a refuge from a bad day or the mundanity of driving a car for hours. Dan talks about how banal moments become pregnant with meaning when music scores them. The film backs him up when Dan and Gretta stroll through Times Square listening to Frank Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady” through a splitter connected to a phone. This ordinary walk through the big city looks and sounds like the most magical thing to do ever. BEGIN AGAIN is foremost about the joy of music, but it makes for a beautiful love letter to New York too. With all apologies to THEY CAME TOGETHER, the city is a character and a charming one at that for Knightley in her simple but cute wardrobe and a fashionably scruffy Ruffalo to explore.

The tuneful songs by Gregg Alexander stick in the ear without seeming so accomplished as to exceed the capability of an undiscovered talent. BEGIN AGAIN’s perception of the industry, even in its weakened state, is less credible. Sure, it’s amusing to note how smarmy label executives can be and how misguided their ideas are for retaining paying customers. Levine makes for a funny sellout whose waywardness can be measured by the amount of facial hair he grows. Maybe Dan’s dismissal of the demos, which more or less sound like today’s pop hits, is meant to show he’s out of touch, although it seems like rockist cheap shots at highly engineered and fussed over songs. Even with Gretta’s standard singer-songwriter fare being jazzed up through its means of production, her music hardly seems like the kind of thing to send shockwaves through the charts or the business. Her assertion that people want authenticity sounds misguided, especially when examining the current bestsellers, and her resistance to a contract and publicity, as if she’s Jandek, defines protesting too much for someone working in the system. BEGIN AGAIN has insiders believing they are outsiders, so it’s better served by celebrating music than critiquing the industry.

Knightley and Ruffalo have a nice, relaxed chemistry suggestive of romantic undercurrents, although Carney doesn’t push the matter too intensely. Their attraction is based more in sharing an emotionally vulnerable time in their lives than physical magnetism. Their potential salvations are meant to come through the songs, not each other, and BEGIN AGAIN hums with the excitement of creative collaboration and the exuberant mystery born out of music and lyrics.

Grade: B