A sweet and minor bit of hagiography, Southside With You is a subtler but still freighted counterpart to political broadsides like Dinesh D'Souza's regrettable Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. It's radical in that it invites us to consider two political lightning rods as people first.
Still, one can't help but wonder if the film would hold much interest if it weren't an (imagined) account of future President Barack Obama and future first lady Michelle Robinson's first date. First-time writer-director Richard Tanne obviously has a Richard Linklater Before picture in mind, although he tones down the lacerating, hurtful honesty of some of the exchanges in that film between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, and ratchets up the earnest groping toward philosophy. Here, Barack (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle (Tika Sumpter) are good-looking progressives, each with the highly evolved social consciousness of an ambitious Young Democrat/Saul Alinsky acolyte. (Who makes a first date out of a community activist meeting? Well, maybe if you're trying to impress someone with your rhetorical skills. Maybe, especially, if that someone insists at the outset that your outing is definitely "not a date.")
Southside With You
87 Cast: Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Phillip Edward Van Lear, Donald Paul, Deborah Geffner
Director: Richard Tanne
Rating: PG-13, for brief strong language, smoking, a violent image and a drug reference
Running time: 84 minutes
But we kid, because Southside With You is a charming and harmless exercise in which two smart and attractive people pretend to fall in something like love while kicking around what was, in 1989, a pretty dangerous American city.
While Tanne takes plenty of artistic license with what may have been said during the hours the young lawyers spent in each others' company, the basic framework of the afternoon and evening have long been known. The two went to the Art Institute to see an exhibit of black painter Ernie Barnes' work, then (maybe? probably?) to the community meeting dramatized in the film, then on to a showing of Spike Lee's just-released Do the Right Thing. They capped off the evening at Baskin-Robbins at 53rd Street and Dorchester Avenue, where their first kiss is commemorated with a historical plaque. (The BR, however, has not survived; there's a Subway at the address now.)
Despite some obvious congruencies -- Barack and Michelle are up-and-comers though she's a little ahead of him at this point -- they aren't perfectly matched. She chides him on his smoking and high school marijuana use; he seems a little envious of her perfect family and notes his odd, mostly fatherless, upbringing in places like Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia.
As a pure romance, this well-cast, well-acted film mightn't be convincing -- it needs the illusion that we're eavesdropping on future icons to genuinely capture our attention -- but it's easy to watch and doesn't overstay its welcome. And if, in the end, we realize that it adds virtually nothing to our understanding of either Obama, maybe it says something about us that we hoped it might. After all, it's only a movie.
MovieStyle on 08/26/2016