Get Out (2017)

Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black man dating White Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) heads for a weekend with her White parents (Katherine Keener, Bradley Whitford) in their White town surrounded by the Whitest of White culture. All the White people are a bit extreme, making constant weird comments about race, but the Black servants are stranger, robot-like at times, hostile at others.

Get Out is a hard film to review, or even comment on, as it is all about theme, and that theme is clearly expressed and very important. Is it a problem that everything else doesn’t quite work? If the plot was original, if the characters were genuine or captivating or acted reasonably, then the focus would switch and perhaps the theme wouldn’t be as visible. But the focus is on theme (for two acts—I’ll get to that in a moment) and it does a beautiful job of showing what it feels like to be a Black man in America. And that’s a victory for any film.

I’d be slipping into spoiler territory if every bit of advertising didn’t give it away, but as it does: For most of the running time, Get Out is The Stepford Wives. While The Stepford Wives is always good, it is only great once—that first time you see it, before you know what it is about. And it is 1975. Switching from sexism to racism unfortunately makes the date less important, but the story can only be great once. And writer/director Jordan Peele realized that, so he changed the final act to one that doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. And by “changed,” I mean changed what film he was borrowing from, but then originality isn’t the point. Does a different ending make it better or worse? It certainly makes it more cathartic. It also completely tosses out that overwhelming theme from the first two acts. But maybe that’s what was needed. Get Out isn’t a disconnected piece of art; it’s all about the effect it has on the modern world, on racism, and on audiences, particularly Black audiences. So perhaps after hammering one theme home for an hour, what was needed was a different one, a theme about survival. Maybe the film is better switching from “what is” to “what can be.” That is more for sociologists to determine than a film reviewer. But whatever the case, Get Out is interesting, and if it isn’t a complete success in storytelling, that’s OK as that wasn’t the goal.