‘Southside’ provides charming look at famous first date
Movie: “Southside With You” Running time: 84 minutes Rating: PG-13; brief strong language, smoking, a violent image and a drug reference Grade: B Now playing: At multiple locations intransigence begins to soften. Sharing their histories with everything from family, religion and the psychic commute between “planet black” and “planet white” to “Good Times,” Ernie Barnes and Stevie Wonder, Michelle and Barack’s discursive, ambling date takes on the contours of romantic destiny as, to quote Rilke, two strong, self-identified solitudes tentatively reach out to protect and touch and greet each other.
Tanne, who makes an impressively sensitive feature debut here, drenches “Southside With You” with deliciously textured atmosphere and 1980s nostalgia, from the rickety Nissan Sentra that Barack drives — his ashtray full of cigarette butts — to Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” that blares from the dashboard radio. Although the filmmaker has taken the slight liberty of inserting an organizing meeting where it didn’t literally exist on the day, the license gives him — and, more crucially, Michelle — a chance to see Barack in action, delivering a brilliant extemporaneous speech on the need for mutual understanding and the inherent messiness of democracy.
That’s one of the few winks to what lies ahead for Obama in “Southside With You,” which does an admirable job of keeping the focus on the simple question of whether this relationship can be saved before it even has a chance to begin.
Of course, part of the pleasure of watching “Southside With You” is the audience knowing what the characters don’t — the frisson playing at the edges of a scene when Barack tells Michelle that he feels like something’s pulling at him, he just can’t tell what.
“Southside With You” is the first of what will surely be a spate of myth-making movies about the Obamas as they prepare to leave the White House.
But seen through another lens, it’s about anyone who has experienced the mystery of discernment, and heard the whispers of a still, small voice that cannot be ignored.