Mark Reviews Movies: YOU PEOPLE

You People, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 26, 2023

There's no avoiding that matters of race—the long and continuing history of injustice in this country in particular—remain difficult to address and discuss, as necessary as those conversations may be. You People attempts to get at the thorniness and discomfort of those discussions by way of a modern-day romance, in which a Jewish man and a Black Muslim woman fall in love, only to face some trouble when their parents find out about the relationship. Co-writers Jonah Hill, who also stars, and Kenya Barris, who also directed, probably have good intentions with this material, but it's difficult to really see them beneath the layers of cheap jokes and the broad characterizations.

Hill plays Ezra, a not-quite-practicing Jew, who works a dead-end office job and dreams of making it big in podcasting. We first meet Ezra recording shows with his best friend and co-host Mo (Sam Jay), a Black woman, and the two discuss all matters of Black culture, including music and fashion, and occasionally get into things about their personal lives. This is a fine setup—one that possesses a natural way for two characters to openly talk about the things that the filmmakers want to explore. It's not the one for this story, unfortunately.

That arrives when Ezra meets Amira (Lauren London), in a most convoluted, unlikely, and wholly coincidental meet-not-so-cute that has him unthinkingly getting into the backseat of her car, which just happens to be parked in front of his office, since she's lost on her a way to a gig and when he's anticipating a driver who looks like her and drives the same model of car. It's not a good sign for the comedy in this romantic comedy when the whole relationship depends upon a gag that's a one-in-a-million coincidence, goes on way longer than is necessary to make the point, and tries to shove in some commentary about Ezra's cultural and racial assumptions, while also making him completely innocent of those things.

It's not a good sign for the romance, by the way, when the Hill and Barris skip past the actual process of these characters connecting. There's an unfortunate habit of the storytelling here to just jump forward in time, so that, in one moment, Ezra and Amira have just met and, in the very next, he's getting ready for their first date. It's worse and more telling about how the screenwriters have imagined and defined these characters that the two bond over shoes and clothes, only for the rest of their conversation and, indeed, a whole series of proceeding dates to play out in voiceless montage.

The movie has no interest in these characters as individuals, which is ironic considering the fact that the entirety of the complications and conflicts within the story have to do with how others can't look past each one's ethnicity and the pairing's status as a mixed-race couple. Hill and Barris are far too hasty in getting to that conflict for the relationship and its participants to be anything more than the bare minimum of those qualities.

Most of this, indeed, revolves around the respective issues belonging to Ezra's mother Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who's a bit too excited and eager and uncomfortably vocal about the prospect of having a Black daughter-in-law, and Amira's father Akbar (Eddie Murphy), a devout member of the Nation of Islam who's none-too-happy about his daughter's choice for a boyfriend. David Duchovny and Nia Long play each parent's respective spouse, but don't worry about them, because the filmmakers don't, either.

Some typical scenes follow. Ezra makes a fool of himself when he tries to introduce himself to Amira's parents. A dinner with both families becomes incredibly awkward on account of conversations about religion and politics. Shelley suddenly starts speaking with a lot of slang and looks for racism everywhere but in herself. When the lovers become engaged to be married, Akbar tries to sabotage his future son-in-law's bachelor party and to find some dirt on the guy, and Shelley shows up at Amira's bachelorette party to be foolish around her future daughter-in-law's family and friends.

The setups are the stuff of cliché. The content of the strained jokes isn't much better, although the tendency to push certain buttons—particularly in raising antisemitism, the Holocaust, and a comparison of that genocide with slavery in the United States—without any reason beyond the discomfort feels disingenuous at best or, at worst, in bad taste. You People comes across as superficially daring, but the movie's core is too hollow for it to really challenge or say much of value.

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