I wasn’t even planning on watching this. I was originally going to check out Rebel Moon, but then I read up on how there was going to be a director’s cut, and given… well, everything to do with Zack Snyder and extended cuts, I want to both avoid the larger conversation as best I can while also giving him the best chance possible. So, as a result, that review is getting moved to early next year. And out of blind panic, and remembering that this film was a talking point earlier in the year, I basically went “fuck it” and picked this. Words cannot express how much I regret that decision.
This is a two-hour long social misunderstanding. Like, legit, the only reason this film is as long as it is is because it takes the potentially-funny character action of people talking for way longer than they need to, but applies that to every single person on-screen. Every single joke, even the ones that got a positive reaction out of me from the trailer, is stretched out like it’s on a torture rack, to the point where I shot straight from denial to bargaining and begging for it to please, for the love of Dude, end already!
The presentation is bad enough, making me cringe so heavily and so frequently that it felt like my skull was going to pop out of my face like a goddamn Pez dispenser. But the specific subject matter here makes it so much worse because this is trying to speak some Important shit. It’s a rom-com set across cultural lines between the Jewish Ezra (Jonah Hill) and the Black Amira (Lauren London), with a lot of the discomfort coming from the frictions between their respective parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny for Ezra, Eddie Murphy and Nia Long for Amira).
The script, from Hill and director Kenya Barris, aims for a tone of mutual self-deprecation, exposing ‘both sides’ for the casually shitty attitudes they have towards each other and even themselves. However, the actual result of the dialogue is not just painful, but aggressively unhelpful. For the most part, the iconography for Ezra and his family leans more towards ‘naïve White liberal’ than specifically Jewish, with Louis-Dreyfus and Duchovny serving as a tone-deaf parody of the White parents in Get Out, and Louis-Dreyfus in particular consistently putting her foot in her mouth.
I know that I talked about Jews and the status of being White back when I reviewed BlacKkKlansman, but as is usually the case, my position on the whole thing has changed now that I’ve actually read up and listened to what the people that are directly involved have to say on the subject. Cultural assimilation is a sticking point I see getting brought up a lot within the diaspora, and as I want to make a habit of doing, I’m not going to speak directly for any group that I’m not actively a part of. But considering the frequent references made here to conspiracy theories regarding Jews (they own all the money, they led the slave trade, etc.), the fondness in-film for Louis Farrakhan, and the recurring presumption of Jewish people as White, none of which ever really get challenged on-screen… yeah, this is a yikes.
Even beyond the iffyness of the specific points made, the regressive nature of the commentary is echoed by how behind-the-times pretty much everything here is. The needle drops, while good on their own, are so isolated to the 2010s that they fail at the usual M.O. for stuff like this in establishing the story in a specific timeframe, even through a nostalgic lens. There’s also how said needle drops, in particular Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Niggas In Paris, leads to a prolonged baiting joke that was probably old as fuck before the song in question even came out. So long as it fills up time, who cares how dated your shit is, right?
Look, when the film focuses solely on Ezra and Amira as a couple, it’s not that bad. Hill and London have some cute chemistry together, and there’s a certain subterranean want to see these two stick together amidst all the commotion. Hell, I’ll even concede that Hill is far and away the best part of this movie because he, like the audience, desperately wants to break through the cringe and just be happy. Unfortunately, whatever modicum of praise I can give this is drowned out by how much psychic damage I did to myself by watching this thing in its entirety. At best, it succumbs to weak-kneed liberalisms that are way less cutting than the filmmakers think that they are. And at worst, it just adds fuel to the fire with conflicts between races, between religions, between cultures, at a time when we adamantly do not need this shit.
This initially showing up not long after Kanye West’s Hitler rant is bad enough, but considering the world is now at a point of literal war between the religious cultures featured here, with everyone and their dogpile podcast insisting that we take sides because there are always ‘right’ sides in war, I am struggling to think of a single positive influence this film could have on the current state of the very debate it’s trying to speak truth about.
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