Dear White People
is an invigorating film, a sharp campus comedy that’s a powerful work of
cultural observation and critique. With his debut feature, writer-director
Justin Simien proves himself a fresh and vital new voice. The film understands
the huge rush of intellectual sparring, the stimulation of smart talk and intellectual
experimentation. A clever dissection of identity politics, it is pointed and
complicated, as cool, empathetic, and impassioned as it is dryly funny. Set on
a fictional Ivy League campus, it’s an unsparing look at campus politics and
race relations, but creates such a wonderful cast of original characters that
it’s also a sweet character study about people simply trying to assert their
race, gender, sexuality, and class and finding themselves tied up in
ideological knots, feeling outside pressure to conform to their stereotypes.
We meet several students whose plotlines crisscross
throughout the course of the film, each representing a fascinating, vibrant,
and thrillingly contradictory collection of viewpoints. It’s smartly
constructed so that they’re characters first, their ideas second, but one is
inextricable from the other. There’s the impassioned black student activist
(Tessa Thompson) who writes tracts, makes student films (her “Rebirth of a
Nation,” for example), holds demonstrations, and hosts a campus radio show
called “Dear White People.” It’s filled with barbs like, “Dear White People,
the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just
been raised.” Her secret white boyfriend (Justin Dobies) tells her she should
“hold up a mirror, not drop an ideological piano” on her audience. Her
supporters at the black student union (led by Marque Richardson) agitate for
her to push their agenda forward. Other black students, like an econ major and
striving reality show aspirant (Teyonah Parris), call her “blacker-than-thou”
and a “bougie Lisa Bonet wannabe.”
A more neutral party is the aimless gay sophomore (Tyler
James Williams) whose afro and skin color get him a job at the school newspaper, since
they all feel too white to write about this controversy. Still others, like the
handsome president (Brandon P. Bell) of the historically all-black dorm about
to be gutted by a “housing randomization act,” who happens to be son of the
Dean of Students (Dennis Haysbert), doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. He
starts to feel the activist heat when she decides to take his place. The film’s
perceptive in its creation of a variety of roles for black actors, speaking
from a multiplicity of experiences and backgrounds.
But this is also a movie about white people. The black student activists, but especially the radio show, annoy the white frat bros (led by Kyle Gallner) who think the
hardest thing to be in American society is an educated white man. The head bro
is the son of the college’s president (Peter Syvertsen) who is somehow sure
racism is over, not knowing that his son’s frat party is poised to be flagrantly
racist, complete with white students in blackface. They think meaning it as a
joke makes it somehow okay. We sit with them and understand their perspective, even though the conclusions they draw are deeply flawed. A prologue showed us news coverage of said party
before flashing back to the beginning of the fall semester, so we know it’s happening.
The film is clever in slowly teasing out the campus culture that allows it to
bubble up in the first place.
While that’s a lot of characters and subplots to juggle and
a great thorny tangle of modern identity, Simien keeps the ensemble storylines
moving along. He cares about his characters, making sure none become mere
punchline, or are artificially weakened to make a political point. It’s a
comedy, more of situation and recognition than snap, crackle, pop. But the dialogue
is written and performed with a heightened crackling intelligence. And it never
feels like Simien has them reading passages from a doctoral thesis. It’s a film
about real people dealing with how they define themselves and how others define
them, struggling to perform their identities as they live, love, and argue in
the forge of identity that college can be.
And that’s what makes conversations about societal
expectations, stereotypes, cultural appropriation, “ironic” racism, and code
switching all the more powerful. Where else but college do you have the freedom
to talk about these ideas and live them at the same time? It’s an authentically
collegiate experience, with kids grappling with the big issues while living out
a microcosm of the world at large. Some of them want to hold court and get in
philosophical debates in the cafeteria. Others just want to study, or hook up,
or smoke weed.
This is a fun ensemble comedy with characters I cared about, every major role expertly inhabited by a well-cast performer. It also
happens to be one of the most politically vital works of pop filmmaking in
quite some time. It takes a long, hard look at the variety of ways we interact
with a variety of identities, spotting prejudiced aggressions big and small, in
the context of a funny, romantic, sometimes moving entertainment. It’s not
often a movie comes along that’s so hugely satisfying and so intoxicatingly
intelligent.
Simien is a welcome new voice, using his talents to create
one of the smartest, liveliest films of the year. He's a promising first-time director, excited to be playing with
technique, with slow zooms, chapter headings, and voice over for emphasis and
structure. Perhaps most effective is the way he takes certain confrontations –
a conversation between the president and the dean, say – that could be filmed
in a simple two shot and instead cuts back and forth between characters
speaking in profile towards each other. This emphasizes the disjunction, how
quickly honest discussion of race becomes pointless. They’re trapped in their
own boxes, talking past each other.
Dear White People
is about the hard work of breaking down those boxes, finding barriers where they usually can’t be seen,
and especially as people run into differences between the way they want to
be seen and how others see them. Identity is more than a collection of
signifiers and affectations, no matter how convenient it is for media, corporations,
institutions, friends and neighbors to reduce you to them. Here's a movie that says it's okay to love Spike Lee and Taylor Swift. (Whew.) Simien writes
wonderfully complicated characters in a film that gives them space to be
themselves, to argue and grow. It doesn’t solve problems or wallow in them, but serves them up in the context of a story well told. It’s a powerful,
nuanced work of cultural critique that’s also a fun time at the movies.
