Review by Bob Ignizio
Jordan Peele is best known for being one half of the comedy
team Key and Peele, so you might expect his first film as writer/director would
be an overt comedy. Instead, he has produced a potent mix of social commentary,
and horror. Sure, there's some humor. But with GET OUT, Peele is more concerned with building slow-burn suspense, hitting
viewers with visceral shocks, and leaving them with insights on race than he is
with getting a laugh.
The film's set-up is that fine-art photographer Chris (Daniel
Kaluuya) is preparing to meet his girlfriend Rose's (Allison Williams) parents
for the first time. She hasn't told them that Chris is black, but assures him they
aren't racist. Nonetheless, Chris' best friend and TSA officer Rod (Lil Rel Howery)
is worried that his pal could be walking into an awkward situation.
He doesn't know the half of it.
On the surface, Rose's neurosurgeon dad Dean (Bradley
Whitford) and psychiatrist wife Missy (Catherine Keener) seem nice and open
minded. Missy is a bit pushy about helping Chris kick his cigarette habit, and
Dean probably tries a bit too, remarking how he would have voted for Obama a third
time if he could have, but they don't seem to have any problem accepting their
daughter's choice of boyfriend.
But there are signs that all is not as it seems. Rose's
brother makes some insensitive talk about "genetic stock' at the dinner
table. And then there's the help. Groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and maid
Georgina (Betty Gabriel) kind of creep Chris out. It's not just the stereotype
of upper middle class white folks having black hired hands. There's something seriously
off about these two. And the longer Chris stays with Rose's family, the weirder
things get.
As anyone who has seen the film's trailer could surmise, GET OUT is a bit of a riff on the
seventies shocker THE STEPFORD WIVES.
In that film, a patriarchal status quo threatened by feminism finds an
insidious way to turn modern women into compliant housewives. GET OUT does kind of the same thing
with race. But rather than go after the sort of overt racism you might expect,
it instead pursues another tack that could best be described as "extreme
cultural appropriation".
Peele's screenplay is smart and carefully plotted. He plants
plot seeds that pay off later in a satisfying way, and his characters act believably.
His direction isn't particularly flashy, but in the era of gratuitous fast
editing and overdone color palettes, the meat and potatoes, solid storytelling
approach he takes is refreshing. 4 out of 4 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We approve all legitimate comments. However, comments that include links to irrelevant commercial websites and/or websites dealing with illegal or inappropriate content will be marked as spam.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.