Writer(s): Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, and Catherine Keener
The appearance of Get Out in multiplexes nationwide is well-timed: Race relations are once again out-of-whack. A lot of this is due to a media that likes to blow everything out of proportion—race-baiting riles everyone up which leads to massive readership and attention for the publication—but there is also no denying that America really does have a systemic race problem. It may have peaked with slavery in the 1800s, and again in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, but the residual effects continue to trickle throughout the veins of America like a disease. And just like the worst of diseases, there isn't—and will never be—a cure.
That studio executives have decided this is the best time to mass-release a “black-themed” horror movie is no surprise; what is a massive shock is the man responsible for creating it: Jordan Peele, part of the “Key & Peele” comedy duo. I would not have expected him to create what is ostensibly a straight-ahead horror film (complete with a few laughs, as can be expected), but he has done it, and his vision is hit-or-miss, with plenty of both.
The easiest way to explain it is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner meets The Invitation: Chris is preparing to meet Rose's rich parents, Dean and Missy Armitage. He is nervous, especially when Rose reveals that she has not told them that he is black; she assures him that race is not an issue, and that they will not mind the color of his skin. Chris still has reservations, but puts them aside, giving his girlfriend of four months the benefit of the doubt. After all, who would know Rose's parents better than Rose?
As always, things have to get off to an ominous start, and this trip is no exception: the two run into a deer en route, causing some minor damage to their car, but thankfully leaving no physical injuries. The rest of the trip goes as scheduled, and after traveling miles and miles through wooded areas, they finally arrive at the Armitages' sprawling, secluded estate. Of course it's secluded, with the next house conveniently “across the river” in Dean's own words.
Chris and Rose think it will be just them, and Rose's parents, but soon Rose's weird brother arrives. Then they get the news that it's the weekend of the big family gathering, something Rose forgot, so they will be joined by dozens and dozens of rich white folk the next day. Rose apologizes for the foresight, but Chris, ever wanting to be accepted by the parents, just brushes everything aside and goes along with it as best he can.
He would be alone through all of this if it weren't for his best friend Rod, a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agent whom he keeps in contact with via cell phone. This proves to be perhaps the film's biggest downfall, as Rod provides both the comedic relief, and later on, Chris's only hope for survival. I hate the idea of having a strict “comedic relief” character, and movies like this are the reason why: it ruins momentum. Every scene with Rod puts the brakes on a film that otherwise slow-builds to a a dreadful peak atmosphere, where danger seems to lurk around every corner. Rod is the “typical” movie black man, spouting obscenities and serving as Chris's (convenient) window to the outside world, and the film suffers because of it.
Things gradually get a little strange. Actually, they are strange right from the outset, what with Missy's offer to hypnotize Chris in order to stop his smoking habit, offered up almost right from the outset. Chris brushes his aside as small talk; two parents who are just trying to find common ground between themselves, and their daughter's new boyfriend. But what about the house's maid and groundskeeper, who are also black? Dean discusses it away (they hired them to care for his ailing mother and didn't have the heart to let them go after that) but there's just something that's not right about the servants...or the family for that matter...
One night, Chris sneaks outside for a smoke. After an alarming meeting with the groundskeeper, Chris returns inside, where he is approached by Missy. She is very disapproving of Chris's smoking habit, especially after learning he smokes cigarettes in front of their daughter, and offers to hypnotize him right there as a means to "cure" him. Chris declines, but she does it anyway, getting him to recount that fateful day that he, at eleven years of age, lost his mother to a hit and run accident. She also takes him to her “sunken place”, where he is no longer in control of his body, but can see everything that is going on around him (or to him, as the case may be). Chris wakes up, at first believing it to be a dream, but learns later that it was not...on the plus side, though, he loses his interest in cigarettes!
Then, it's the next day and the white folks come in droves. All are friendly and rich, but one of them sticks out like a sore thumb: Andrew Logan King, a skinny black man married to an older white woman. That the marriage is interracial isn't so alarming in and of itself (although they are the only such pairing amidst the dozen or so couples), but it's the way that Andrew acts. Well, as a "well-mannered white man" first and foremost, but also as if he's hiding something. Wanting to capture “evidence” to present to Rod, Chris snaps a photo of Andrew, who seems to snap out of a trance, attacking Chris and warning him to “get out”. Andrew is quickly subdued and returns to his “normal” happy self. But Chris has seen enough and desperately wants to leave, something that, as we know by now, probably won't be so easy.
I correctly guessed the “twist” a week before I even sat down to watch the movie, but Peele and his actors do a great job of selling it: I second-guessed myself many times, thinking that the movie was better and smarter than that, but sure enough that's where it goes. And that is just its problem: While no white man can accurately “feel” what it's like to go through the day as a member of another race, Peele cleverly constructs it in such a way where whites can at least “understand” the daily “risks” of being a non-white person in today's society. Chris (and the other African-Americans who are on display, both literally and figuratively) are clearly outcasts in a white-dominated world. They are “domesticated”, allowed to exist only within the same house as rich white folk if they act like rich white folk, happy to serve their masters. It presents everything so cleverly, that wrapping everything around a series of well-worn horror tropes just feels like a grave injustice. This is a movie that should be more intelligent than that, a movie that should have things to say so profound that it cannot be summarized within the simple confines of much stupider movies. But it settles, and the results are often rather pedestrian.
On the one hand, I get what Peele was doing: by trapping the film within the tired framework of thousands of films before it, he assures that he gets his message to as many multiplexes as possible. At the same time, however, it feels like he's sacrificing at least some of his artistic integrity, and “watering down” his true feelings just for the sake of catering to a wide audience (and at the same time, earning loads of bank in the process). It's a fine line, and I will not pretend to understand his mindset by putting words in his mouth, but either way, this is a film that would have much more of an impact if it was gutsy enough to “stray away from the track”, so to speak, and try catching its audience off guard, rather than to cater to them.
What Get Out gets unanimously right is the personnel: it gets great mileage out of its cast, who deliver first rate performances. Daniel Kaluuya, who I recognized from what I consider to be one of the greatest episodes in television history, “Fifteen Million Merits” from the first season of Black Mirror, is fantastic in the crucial main role, nailing his impression of at first a baffled, then incredulous black man caught in a world that is foreign to him. Allison Williams is excellent as the caring girlfriend, and is the perfect actress for roles of this type, with a natural, plain beauty that believably presents her as an “everyday girl”.
Unfortunately, though, Get Out is undone by its familiarity, which sabotages much of what Peele was trying to accomplish. Its ending, which lead to many cheers from the audience I saw it with, is a complete cop-out that beautifully sets up, then avoids, a scathing gut-punch of a finish, in favor of a crowd-pleaser that conveniently ties up all loose ends and will be much more quickly forgotten. It's not a bad film by any means, and it's great that it puts African Americans and their plight to the eyes of large audiences, but it's ultimately disheartening in the way Peele removes much of the potentially-sharp nature of the material, to deliver a film that is ultimately as blank and emotionally-removed as many of the characters that inhabit it.
RATING: 5.5/10
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