Meeting the parents.
Throughout most of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, all the way up to its final act, you keep waiting for the metaphorical pointed white hoods to come out -- for the movie’s awkward social racism to transition to violent, overt racism. But while there is something sinister behind the Armitage family’s accepting facade, the party they throw when daughter Rose (Allison Williams) brings home her black boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is not a secret white power rally.
That’s definitely what you’re meant to think, whether from watching a trailer or simply paying attention to the movie’s bread crumb trail of clues. But that’s not the way it goes, and by the end you’ll realize that Get Out excels at inverting your expectations. Like Chris, you’re being manipulated. And it works on so many levels.
Written and directed by Peele, Get Out marks his first notable creative foray outside comedy since Key and Peele’s end in 2015. And it’s quite a thriller, running the gamut of horror tropes from cheesy jump scares to dead cell phones and lost keys. More importantly, tension tugs at the edges of every scene, driven largely by your misgivings about various characters. You know something is up, but you’re not sure exactly what or who’s in on it, and that uneasy feeling never truly leaves you alone until the credits roll.
But Get Out is also extremely funny when it wants to be, and unsurprisingly its humor perfectly captures exactly what made Key and Peele so fantastically hilarious. The premise reads like a Key and Peele sketch concept: A black man visits his white girlfriend’s rich family and awkwardness ensues. Like any Key and Peele sketch, the concept goes a step farther than you might expect, and it turns out there really is something sinister going on. Now nudge the tonal slider away from comedy and toward horror, and you have Get Out.
When it’s not laugh-out-loud funny or armrest-gripping terrifying, Get Out spends most of its other time capturing the uneasy experience of sitting at a family dinner while your parents ruthlessly interrogate your significant other, like a more sinister version of Meet the Parents. Chris, played with palpable chagrin by Kaluuya, grits his teeth as Rose’s parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) berate him about smoking in front of their daughter, badger him about letting them hypnotize him, and confess knowingly that they “would have voted for Obama a third time” if they could.
Chris even keeps it together -- just barely -- as a parade of increasingly absurd white party guests (and one Asian man) gawk at his well-toned arms and ask questions like whether there are more advantages or disadvantages to being African American. Meanwhile Caleb Landry Jones is shockingly punchable as Rose’s college-aged little brother, who sits across from Chris at dinner throwing him barely-veiled racists barbs about his “genetic” advantages and how easily he could become a “beast” if he worked out harder.
The whole thing is made stranger by the pair of black servants the Armitages employ, Georgina the housekeeper and Walter the groundskeeper. They’re always there in the background, Georgina adjusting her wig and Walter running full tilt across the lawn in the dead of night, both characters talking like an old white person’s racist idea of how black people talk. Actors Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson’s performances are deeply unsettling, though it’s hard to pin down exactly why. As Chris puts it, it’s not what they say, but how they say it, which is often the case in Get Out.
Rose herself is absolutely perfect, a privileged, naive young woman portrayed so masterfully by Williams that you’ll question every assumption you make about her even right up to the end. And the cast is rounded out by LilRel Howery, who as Chris’s best friend plays the dual parts of concerned outsider to the situation and much-needed comedy relief whenever the movie starts to feel too messed up. Even as his half-joking warnings that Chris is unwise to visit his white girlfriend’s parents prove truer and truer, the character is always ready with a joke, and a lot of the comedy comes simply from the familiar way he and Chris speak with one another in a film filled otherwise with characters trying and failing to fit in where they don’t feel they belong.
Get Out embraces the exact kind of race-based social awkwardness Key and Peele so often explored. It effectively conveys the experience of being the one black guy in the room, everyone around you trying so hard to make you feel welcome that it goes way past full circle to teeth-gritting discomfort. And it goes deeper than that, because of course there’s more going on under the surface of Get Out’s awkward conversations about how being black is “in fashion” or whether Chris has ever golfed.
And that seems to suggest that there’s something else behind the real life situations the movie references -- a subtle but malignant racism, even if the people making bad jokes or using inappropriate slang profess innocence or genuinely don’t understand that they’re being racist.
Even if that life experience differs from yours, it’s hard not to relate with Chris’s plight in this movie, his conflicting desires both to fit in and to tell every single person in the room to get bent. And when Get Out finally gets to its point, it really goes there, like a Key and Peele sketch that went three steps past where you thought the joke would end.
The Verdict
Get Out’s whole journey, through every tense conversation, A-plus punchline and shocking act of violence, feels totally earned. And the conclusion is worth each uncomfortable chuckle and moment of doubt. Ultimately Get Out can’t help but ask the question: How would all these white people feel if they could walk in a black person’s shoes for a day? And that’s something worth considering.
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