PARENT TRAP
‘Get Out’ shows interracial dating isn’t black and white
VISITING a posh suburb where rich people live in Gatsby-esque splendor, a black photographer observes that there’s something oddly fawning and subservient about the black folks there: It’s like they’re the Stepford Brothers.
“Get Out” isn’t the Black Lives Matter horror flick “The Purge” reimagined along race instead of class lines. Instead, this cleverly crafted chiller, written and directed by Jordan Peele (of the Key & Peele comedy duo), is open about its debt to “The Stepford Wives,” even giving its protagonist the same career as that pursued by Katharine Ross in the 1975 film. It’s Peele’s first film, but it has none of the rough edges or selfindulgence you’d expect from a rookie.
Chris (an appealing Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous about visiting the parents of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). “Do they know I’m black?” he asks. She tells him not to worry: Her dad is an Obama-loving liberal whose friends make sure to tell the interracial couple how wonderfully they go together and even point out that it’s cool to be black. Peele does expert work ratcheting up the strangeness so that it isn’t quite clear whether Chris should be terrified. In other words: Are these people freaks or are they just white? Even some of their more eccentric habits are attractive, in a way. Who would oppose being hypnotized if it enabled him to quit smoking?
“Get Out” keeps a wary eye on how the suburbanites coo at the black person in their midst, and plays with an amusing idea: that black people don’t necessarily see white liberals as the racially enlightened paragons they seem to think they are. Rose’s parents, a neurosurgeon (Bradley Whitford) and a psychotherapist (Catherine Keener), are the kind of people who would ridicule Trump voters as yokels and racists but don’t seem to know any black people to speak of, unless you count their servants.
A deeper movie might have developed this idea more fully. As it is, however, Peele’s content to deliver an entertaining suspenser, one stylistically aligned with the paranoia-inflected conspiracy films of the 1970s, in which the violence is confined to the final minutes, rather than the later slasher films, in which the audience is invited to gorge itself on a junk-food buffet of murders. “Get Out” is scary enough, but it comes with some bonus nutritional value.