![]() ![]() ![]() They are not the most powerful power couple in the free world yet, not by a long shot. But as the tranquil opening moments suggest, this movie takes far more interest in the people behind those well-known, well-honed political personas. She’s simply going to meet up with the newest addition to the Chicago law firm she works at, a Dumbo-eared charmer named Barack Obama. The year is 1989, and the future First Lady is gearing up for what she will repeatedly insist is not a date. ![]() That’s how the indie romantic comedy-drama Southside With You introduces its not-yet-famous female heroine: She’s applying perspiration protection to her underarms. ![]() 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.Even Michelle Obama has to use deodorant. 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. 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. Prim, direct and protective of her professional reputation in an office where she’s the only African-American woman, Michelle - played in a persuasively assured, straightforward turn by Tika Sumpter - has so far made a convincing case for why the two should remain colleagues, albeit friendly ones.īut as the two wend their way through a day that will include an art exhibit, a community meeting at a church, a screening of “Do the Right Thing” and a fateful ice cream cone, her intransigence begins to soften. Played in an uncannily on-point physical and verbal portrayal by Parker Sawyers, the Barack Obama of “Southside With You” is a gangly, somewhat cocky first-year law associate and community organizer in Chicago, who as the movie opens in 1989 has finally convinced Michelle - his adviser at the corporate law firm - to spend a day with him. Fans, on the other hand, will discover a movie that presents the president not as the ready-made icon who seemed to emerge fully formed at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, but as an instinctive communicator and politician, for whom the word “no” merely offers the opportunity for skillful negotiation. It’s unlikely that Obama’s most pathological haters will want to see “Southside With You,” but they’ll be missing a delightfully low-key portrait that is as universal as it is grounded in a well-chronicled public-private life. Lincoln” and Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” and you get a sense of the tone of a movie that tiptoes to the edge of hagiography but never falls in, at least entirely. Imagine a cross between John Ford’s “Young Mr. That the two young people in question are named Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson almost feels like an afterthought in Richard Tanne’s modest but enormously enjoyable throwback of a movie. Like the warm summer day it chronicles, “Southside With You” possesses a mellow, languorous vibe, an infectious easygoing charm that insinuates itself gently, then seductively, as the couple at its center experiences the stirrings of what might be true love. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu ![]()
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