Romance is dead — oh wait, so’s that guy
Nanjiani, Rae commit to comedy in smartly crafted ‘Lovebirds’
Has this ever happened to you? You see a comedy in a movie theater, and it’s hilarious. And then six months later, you watch it on home video, either by yourself or with one or two other people, and it just lays there on screen, barely getting a laugh? Humor needs an audience, which puts extra pressure on comedies released straight to streaming amid the coronavirus shutdown.
The good news about “The Lovebirds,” a feature film from Netflix available to stream Friday, May 22, is that you can watch it by yourself and laugh out loud. Yes, it might have been even funnier with an audience (so would “Saturday Night Live” and the late night talk shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and the like), but it’s funny enough as it is.
The movie places its characters in an intense situation and then finds comic set pieces within it that give the actors a chance to milk the laughs. We first meet Leilani (Issa Rae) and Jibran (Kumail Nanjiani) in a seemingly dead relationship. Early in the movie, they get into an argument that quickly turns cruel. He says he doesn’t want to be with someone who’s shallow; she says she doesn’t want to be with someone who’s a failure.
And then something happens. They’re driving to work and a cop commandeers their car, with them in it. He is chasing a suspect who is on a bicycle. He crashes into the guy, and then, while the suspect is on the ground, he backs up and drives over him — back and forth — until he’s dead.
It’s at this point that Leilani and Jibran catch on that maybe this guy isn’t a cop, maybe this is a really bad guy, and that they’ve just witnessed a homicide.
After the murderer leaves the scene, they’re discovered by witnesses, standing over the dead body. Fearing that the police will assume that they did this, they go on the run and decide to try to solve the case themselves.
Lately, we’re seeing comedies unexpectedly allude to some of the opinions, thoughts and concerns found among the culture at large. “The Lovebirds” could have been made with the same story and a completely different couple 10 years ago, with the script almost unchanged. But this film chooses to make the couple go on the run because they fear the police — she’s black, he’s Muslim, and she assumes that the police will take one look at his “murderous beard” and throw them both in jail.
To the movie’s credit, its treatment of this idea isn’t simple, and its resolution is more generous and complicated than you might expect.
But just the fact that this notion can be found in an otherwise broad comedy is notable.
“The Lovebirds” benefits from director Michael Showalter’s sure hand with comedy. He’s able to find a tone that allows for both absurdity and the possibility of real danger. And while it’s impossible to tell how much, if any, of the movie was improvised, there’s a loose yet controlled feeling about the scenes, as if Rae and Nanjiani were given freedom to experiment, knowing that there was a safety net ready to catch them.
One of the things that we see, for example, are scenes in which Rae and Nanjiani take a comic idea that isn’t all that funny, and then they pursue it and pursue it and pursue it until — through repetition, relentlessness and a certain comic confidence — it becomes very funny. They do this kind of thing in scene after scene, playing off each other expertly, always listening and building on what the other says.
Improvised or not, “The Lovebirds” is built on a solid foundation of smartly crafted situations, and in that case we’re definitely talking about the screenplay (by Aaron Abrams, Brendan Gall and Martin Gero).
Sure, not everything is great. Here and there, the movie goes out of its way to be sentimental. But “The Lovebirds” is a pleasing comedy, funny from beginning to end. That should be enough for anybody.