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Advanced Course in Diversity
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“Dear White People”
is the name of Justin Simien’s first feature film, and I’ll say right
away that it is as smart and fearless a debut as I have seen from an
American filmmaker in quite some time: knowing but not snarky,
self-aware but not solipsistic, open to influence and confident in its
own originality. It’s a clever campus comedy that juggles a handful of
hot potatoes — race, sex, privilege, power — with elegant agility and
only an occasional fumble. You want to see this movie, and you will want
to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little
awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment
to be found here, and very little comfort.
“Dear White People”
is also the title of a series of campus radio broadcasts and viral
Internet videos concocted by one of the movie’s major characters, a
college student named Samantha White, played with heartbreaking poise by
Tessa Thompson. Sam, as she is called, uses “Dear White People” to call
out the hypocrisies, blind spots and micro-aggressions that
African-Americans experience in their daily encounters with well-meaning
Caucasians. Such people, including many of her fellow undergraduates at
the Ivier-than-Ivy League Winchester University, make up a big part of
Sam’s fan base. This is less because they want to subject themselves to
her scolding than because they crave reassurance that they don’t really
need it. The eagerness of some whites to prove that they “get it” on
matters of race — their clumsy appropriations of African-American idioms
and pop-cultural forms — is one of the targets of Sam’s critique and
Mr. Simien’s satire.
Movie Review: ‘Dear White People’
The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews “Dear White People.”
By Robin Lindsay on Publish Date October 17, 2014.
Photo by Ashley Nguyen/Roadside Attractions, via Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »
And
so, at least for this director, is the tendency of some black people to
poke at that insecurity, and to engage one another in fierce battles
about authenticity, appropriate conduct and political strategy. “Dear
White People” deals out a deck of race cards, most of them jokers. To
change the metaphor, the film leads its characters and its viewers —
pale-skinned critics very much included — down a path strewn with
eggshells, some of which sit on top of land mines.
Winchester
is a hothouse of inflamed sensitivity and warring identities, populated
mainly by young people who are eager to do the right thing as well as
all the other things that college students usually do: drink beer, hook
up, make friends, incubate careers and maybe even take a class or two.
Like real-life American institutions of higher learning, this
make-believe college strives to resolve painful and intractable social
divisions, only to end up reproducing them on a smaller scale and in a
more rarefied and intensified form.
Sam,
a mass of contradictions in her own right, is just one element in a
sprawling and intricate narrative machine. Mr. Simien audaciously sets
in motion at least a half-dozen crisscrossing plots, all of which
converge at a campus party that goes terribly and all too believably
wrong. Sam is running for the leadership of a dormitory whose
traditional character as an all-black residence is threatened by a
change in university housing policy. Her rival is Troy (Brandon Bell), a
square-jawed, clean-cut Big Man on Campus who is also her ex-boyfriend.
His father (Dennis Haysbert) is the dean of students, and Troy’s
current (white) girlfriend, Sofia (Brittany Curran), is the daughter of
the university president (Peter Syvertsen). Sofia’s brother, Kurt (Kyle
Gallner), is the editor of the college humor magazine and a proudly
politically incorrect provocateur (and, as such, kind of a jerk).
Sam’s
current lover, a teaching assistant in her film class, is also white,
which may be why she keeps their relationship secret, tolerating the
amorous attention of Reggie (Marque Richardson), her ally in militancy
and, perhaps in her own mind, a more appropriate romantic partner. But
the heart rarely obeys the imperatives of ideology, which can be
confusing enough on their own. Sam’s struggles are mirrored by those of
two other African-American students seeking a way to fit in at
Winchester while staying true to themselves. One is Coco (Teyonah Parris),
who tries to set herself up, in web videos and in the way she dresses,
talks and does her hair, as Sam’s antithesis, an advocate of
assimilation and upward mobility. She also wants to impress a
reality-show producer who is sniffing around campus looking for
provocative material.
And then there is Lionel (Tyler James Williams, faintly recognizable to fans of “Everybody Hates Chris”),
a gay nerd — though he detests such labels — with an unruly Afro and a
clear allergy to the posturing and position taking that surrounds him.
Recruited by the school paper to report on race relations at Winchester
(and also on Sam’s campaign), he endures condescension, curiosity and
contempt as his white and black peers try to slot him into a
pre-existing stereotype, refusing to see him as the brainy, observant,
yearning intellectual that he is.
Such
misrecognition is the universal currency at Winchester and also,
implicitly, beyond its walls. “Dear White People” brilliantly uses the
complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic
paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one
another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds.
Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed)
feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of
recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he
explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of
plausible human beings with amused compassion.
Not
that anyone is let off the hook. “Dear White People” does not point the
way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a
revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a
symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both
sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white
supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves
on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the
distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is
not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.
Mr.
Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He
is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing
and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy. Someone
says of Sam, an aspiring filmmaker, that she secretly likes Ingmar
Bergman more than Spike Lee. Mr. Lee’s “School Daze”
is a clear reference point here, and while Bergman is not an obvious
influence, it’s possible to catch echoes of Whit Stillman, Claude
Chabrol and even Pedro Almodóvar in Mr. Simien’s feel for the nuances
and perversities of social life.
Everyone
should see this movie, and everyone will see it a little differently.
Maybe you will think it goes too far, or not far enough. Since I happen
to belong to the group to which it is explicitly addressed, a direct
response seems warranted. Dear “Dear White People”: Got your message.
Keep in touch.
“Dear
White People” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or
adult guardian). Offense freely given and eagerly taken.
Dear White People
Opens on Friday
Written and directed by Justin Simien; director of photography, Topher Osborn; edited by Phillip J. Bartell; music by Kathryn Bostic; production design by Bruton Jones; costumes by Toye Adedipe; produced by Mr. Simien, Effie Brown, Julia Lebedev, Angel Lopez, Ann Le and Lena Waithe; released by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Tyler James Williams (Lionel Higgins), Tessa Thompson (Sam White), Kyle Gallner (Kurt Fletcher), Teyonah Parris (Coco Conners), Brandon Bell (Troy Fairbanks), Dennis Haysbert (Dean Fairbanks), Brittany Curran (Sofia Fletcher), Peter Syvertsen (President Fletcher), Marque Richardson (Reggie) and Malcolm Barrett (Helmut West).
Opens on Friday
Written and directed by Justin Simien; director of photography, Topher Osborn; edited by Phillip J. Bartell; music by Kathryn Bostic; production design by Bruton Jones; costumes by Toye Adedipe; produced by Mr. Simien, Effie Brown, Julia Lebedev, Angel Lopez, Ann Le and Lena Waithe; released by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Tyler James Williams (Lionel Higgins), Tessa Thompson (Sam White), Kyle Gallner (Kurt Fletcher), Teyonah Parris (Coco Conners), Brandon Bell (Troy Fairbanks), Dennis Haysbert (Dean Fairbanks), Brittany Curran (Sofia Fletcher), Peter Syvertsen (President Fletcher), Marque Richardson (Reggie) and Malcolm Barrett (Helmut West).
