The audacity of hagiography?
“Something else is pulling at me,” the gangly young man with the jug ears says. “I wonder if I can write books or hold a position of influence in civil rights,” he adds. “Politics?” the pretty young woman asks. He shrugs. “Maybe.”
At that point in the romantic idyll “Southside With You,” these two conversationalists are well into one of those intimate walk-and-talks future lovers sometimes share, the kind in which day turns into night and night sometimes turns into the next day (and the day after). As they amble through one Chicago neighborhood after another — pausing here, driving there — they also meander down their memory lanes. He’s from Hawaii and Indonesia. She’s from Chicago, the South Side. He’s going to Harvard Law. She’s been there, done that, and is practicing law. You see where this is going.
Sweet, slight and thuddingly sincere, “Southside With You” is a fictional re-creation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date.
It’s a curious conceit for a movie less because as dates go this one is pretty low key but because the writer-director Richard Tanne mistakes faithfulness for truthfulness.
He’s obviously interested in the Obamas, but he’s so cautious and worshipful there’s nothing here to discover, only characters to admire. Every so often, you catch a glimpse of two people seeing each other as if for the first time; mostly, though, the movie just sets a course for the White House. “You definitely have a knack for making speeches,” Michelle says. Yes, he does.
The story opens with Michelle (Tika Sumpter) talking about Barack (Parker Sawyers) to her parents (“Barack o-what-a?” says dad), while he tells his grandmother about Michelle. She’s his adviser at the firm where he’s a summer associate. Barack digs her; Michelle thinks their dating would be inappropriate. Still, he perseveres with gentle confidence, chipping away at her defenses with searching disquisitions, a park-bench lunch and a visit to an art show, where this stealth-seducer recites lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’ short poem “We Real Cool,” an ominous, disconcerting pre-mortem of some young men shooting pool that closes with the words “We die soon.”
Like Michelle and Barack’s journey through Chicago, the poem raises a cluster of ideas — literary, political, philosophical — about Barack, suggesting where he’s at and where he’s going.
Tanne clearly has made a close study of his real-life inspirations, yet his movie is soon hostage to the couple’s history. His characters feel on loan and, despite his actors, eventually make for dull company because too many lines and details serve the greatman-to-be story rather than the romance. At the art show, when Barack explains that the painter Ernie Barnes did the canvases featured in the sitcom “Good Times,” it isn’t just a guy trying to impress a date; it’s a setup for another big moment.
Sumpter’s enunciation has a near-metonymic precision suggestive of Michelle Obama’s, while Sawyers’ gestural looseness, playful smile and lanky saunter will be familiar.
Sawyers has the better, more satisfying role, partly because of who he plays, though also because Barack is more complex and vulnerable. He is the one with the thorny father issues who is trying to win over the girl (the audience, the nation).
He’s hard to resist even if, by the time he takes Michelle to a community meeting in a housing project — where the aspirations of the family in “Good Times” meet their real-world counterpart — his words sound like footnotes in a political biography.
Barack Obama wrote one such book, “The Audacity of Hope,” in which he describes this first date in a scene that’s echoed in the movie. “I asked if I could kiss her,” Obama writes, before cutting loose his smooth operator: “It tasted of chocolate.” It’s no surprise Obama is a better writer than Tanne and has a stronger sense of drama. But it’s too bad that while Obama’s story about his date has tension, a moral and politics, Tanne’s has plaster saints. Abraham Lincoln was long dead when John Ford polished the presidential halo in the 1939 film “Young Mr. Lincoln.” Obama hasn’t even left office, but the cinematic hagiography has begun.
“Southside With You” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for cigarette smoking. Running time: 1 hour, 24
minutes.