Review

Get Out

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) are a couple who pay a visit to her parents’ mysterious estate in Jordan Peele’s comedic horror film Get Out.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) are a couple who pay a visit to her parents’ mysterious estate in Jordan Peele’s comedic horror film Get Out.

If tragedy plus time equals comedy; immediacy plus racial politics equals horror. At least it does in the hands of the talented Jordan Peele -- who, along with partner Keegan-Michael Key, formed the dynamic comedy duo Key & Peele -- and frankly, it couldn't have come at a more poignant time.

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Georgina (Betty Gabriel) is a suspiciously wooden household servant in Jordan Peele’s horror comedy Get Out.

Key and Peele's work very often cut deeper than your standard sketch show. Where many comedians seek to bludgeon you with their craft, their characters frequently had a sense of backstory and personal history that made them more than their specific punchlines. Here, with his directorial debut, Peele makes the leap from small screen and five-minute segments, to big screen and feature-length with surprising deftness and clarity. If you squint your eyes, you can imagine this being one of their racially relevant sketch setups. Only here, he's not playing for laughs, he's playing for keeps.

Get Out

89 Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Catherine Keener, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, LilRel Howery, Erika Alexander, Keith Stanfield

Director: Jordan Peele

Rating: R, for violence, bloody images, and language including sexual references

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a talented black photographer in an unspecified city (though New York-esque), is a bit trepidatious about going away for the weekend to meet the well-heeled parents of Rose (Allison Williams), his beautiful, white girlfriend. Warned, half-facetiously, about going home with her by his best friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), he nevertheless agrees to go with her, but only after airing his concerns that she hasn't told her parents about his race. Rose assures him her parents aren't the least bit racist, and that her father would have voted for Obama a third time if they had let him, (stating without apparent irony "the love is so real"). Somewhat mollified, Chris, who doesn't drive, goes with Rose up to her parents' mansion somewhere deep in the lily-white suburbs.

Everything seems fine at first, and Rose's father, Dean (Bradley Whitford) seems to take a strong liking to him, but Chris begins to note slightly peculiar goings-on as the day progresses: For one thing, the black maid (Betty Gabriel) and groundskeeper (Marcus Henderson) seem almost robotic, for another, Rose's antsy brother (Caleb Landry Jones), keeps wanting to physically challenge him. Weirdest of all, however, is Rose's mother, Missy (Catherine Keener), a psychiatrist with a skill at hypnosis. When he runs into her late that night after going out for a smoke, she convinces him to let her cure him of the habit by going under. When he wakes up the next day, he's confused by his dreams, and further perplexed by the family dynamic.

As it happens, this weekend there is planned a big party in honor of Rose's late grandfather, which turns out a crowd of elderly white gentry in black limos to celebrate. Putting up with a host of inappropriate questions and comments ("Black is now in fashion," proclaims one portly guest), Chris is glad to see a fellow black man (Keith Stanfield), as one of the guests, only he seems as strangely afflicted as the black staff. More and more suspicious, Chris calls Rod to confide his fears, but the mystery quickly deepens before he can do anything else about it. It's difficult to discuss the film in any further detail without giving away key plot points and twists, but suffice it to say all is most certainly not what it seems.

There is a lot to commend here, beginning with the care and precision of Peele's filmmaking -- among other things, he develops a visual metaphor for sinking from consciousness that is impressively evocative -- and his dedication to character work, but the real genius is the way his setup puts the audience fully on the side of the black protagonist, and terrified by the seemingly perfect white folks he encounters. It's a trick of sympathy that gives white viewers a jolt of what black people living in such a still racially segregated society must endure on a daily basis.

Chris is a perfectly likable protagonist, kind, attentive, loving to his pet dog, and full of social grace, even as his limits are being pushed past the red line. He is, in short, impossible not to root for, and the forces he must ultimately combat become thrillingly visceral and exhilarating. Not for nothing did the audience I saw the movie with clap and whoop it up when Chris begins turning the tables on his adversaries. By taking the natural black fear of white disingenuousness and stereotyping the white characters -- all working together in a hive mind, and shot as if under fluorescent lighting (seriously, the casting call for the partygoers had to have specified "must be thoroughly pasty"), Peele creates a world where everyone can experience the twisty, difficult terrain of a black person attempting to navigate even well-meaning white society, while taking the most basic black abstract suspicions of Caucasians and blowing them up into uproarious satire. It cannily exploits black fears in much the way early silent movies like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation took the white terror of a black uprising and galvanized his audience's conception of the Terrifying Other.

Peele is also canny enough to add just enough elements from his comedy background -- Howery inarguably gets the best, most uproarious lines, and knocks them out of the park -- to keep the film from ever feeling didactic. It's thrilling and sobering, which, as you can imagine is a wildly difficult combination to pull off. In conjunction with its high entertainment value, the film is also a much needed investigation into the white/black power dynamic, which could not be more necessary and timely. If America's pervasive racial division is ever to be traversed, it will likely be up to humane provocateurs such as Peele to lead the way.

MovieStyle on 02/24/2017

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