Jenny gives Jordan Peele's new film Get Out an enthusiastic 4 stars
A British doctor friend recounts the following
frequent piece of dialogue when people meet him for the first time:
So where are you
from?
Croydon, says Matthew
Yes but where are you
from?
If he wants to tease them, he can keep this going
for some time, knowing that the real question is, ‘You’ve got a brown skin, you
sound middle class English but you look Asian so are you from Pakistan or
India?’ The truth is that he really is ‘from’ Croydon, has never been to South
Asia and the grandparents who came penniless to the UK from India via Uganda in
the upheavals of the 1970s are long dead.
This is the kind of unaware patronizing chat that
the first half of Get Out explores
with a uniquely sardonic eye. Chris, a successful photographer played superbly by
the British actor Daniel Kaluuya, is on a meet-the-parents weekend with his
girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). ‘Do they know I’m black?’ he asks
anxiously. ‘Oh no’, she says, telling him that her parents are so unracist that
they would have voted for Obama for a third time, had that been possible. This
trying terribly hard to show how colour blind you are is squirmily funny and
maintained throughout a grisly party where the affluent and somewhat time-worn guests
make graciously condescending references to Tiger Woods or, more gratingly, ask
coy questions about the supposed sexual prowess of black men.
It is a long time since I have seen a film which
so recklessly and confidently mashes up styles and genres. It is biting social
satire, it is comedy – with a great turn from Lil Rey Howery as Chris’s best
friend and dog-sitter. Then it becomes horror straight out of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives though possibly not anything like shocking
enough for the experienced horror movie-goer because there is always a lurking
edge of hysterical laughter even in the most violent scenes.
What is not funny is the way the film reveals the
crevasse of trauma that exists in race relations in the US. The wariness about
crossing the racial divide in romantic relationships, the cultural
appropriation, the lurking expectation of rejection, the impossibility on both
sides of forgetting the shame of slavery – it’s all there.
Could such a film be made here? Probably not: the
target is far too elusive where race is concerned. London is increasingly a
city where a mixed racial heritage is barely worth anyone mentioning or even noticing.
But underlying attitudes to cultural differences are alive and well. We just
have our own specially British versions with ‘jokes’ about Polish plumbers,
Spanish waiters and German bossiness. Our resentment and fear is better hidden
but it’s there all right.
What Get Out
explores is peculiarly American. Jordan Peele, who has a white mother and an African
American father, says that he wrote the film to point out the hypocrisy of
assuming that present day American is ‘post racial’. The real theme of its
clammy horror and sly humour is visible in the faux-modesty of the parents’
house with its antebellum portico and strangely zombie-like black servants who
are so amazingly loyal that they cannot leave.
It is a stroke of genius to cast Bradley Whitford
as Rose’s unctuous neurosurgeon father, when despite his many other acting
credits, BW is surely associated most with his role in The West Wing as a self-assured,
clever, fast talking member of the privileged liberal elite. We are bound to
think, ‘Ah, so that’s what all those politically correct people in the
fantasy-perfect White House were really thinking!’ The film seems to ask, with
perfect timing, ‘What if the Obama years were just an illusion?’ Despite the
laughs, the director’s answer is clear: it was a hoax and now we can see the
ugliness in American society that was there all along.
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