Movie Review
Julia Dreyfus' Miss Shelley or Eddie Murphy's Akbar have no problem casually making racial slurs or insults about black or Jewish history. The biggest problem with comedy isn't its humor. In fact, he has one of the best one-liners on the subject among his peers. They are also frequent and consistent. What makes you special—his finely tuned sense of cultural nuance—is also what makes him exhausting.
Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill) is a 35-year-old Jewish stockbroker with no promise in life. He does a good job of hiding his Jewishness, probably not like Paul Rudd, with tattoos, slicked-back bleached hair and a lively dress sense. No one could tell he was a Jew by looking at him, not even by talking to him. Amira (Lauren London) enters his life at first as an Uber driver, but soon becomes his sole obsession.
Just as most marriages struggle to reconcile family issues, this issue is no different. Akbar (Murphy) can't fathom his daughter marrying a white boy, and Shelley (Dreyfus) can't help overcompensating for her crush on the bride-to-be.
It's a marriage of mismatches; two completely different cultures and lifestyles. Efforts to win the consent of both parties constitute the main principle of You People. A modern-minded Jewish family and a conservative Muslim-black family are a deadly combination.
It's a more than decent premise, and for the most part, director Kenya Barris' vision and style hold up well. As the plot progresses, the impact diminishes, eventually becoming trapped by genre conventions and ceasing any chance of redemption. The review shows that the structure of the band You People is more like a standup. But not in a good way. The randomness of the jokes and lines of thought feels refreshing, but one struggles to string them together. These differently aligned stages make the story separate and crazy. You People's story lacks seamlessness in how it shifts gears from comedy to drama or even in between.
The quality of the writing, which is fantastic in individual sequences, is no small feat. But when you connect the threads, the film is full of continuity traps. Barris gives the impression of taking the subject matter seriously, but refrains from displaying his exposition in dialogue. As soon as it happens, the conversation ends and we move on to another set piece as another ploy to take the story in a different direction. There is no ambition to extrapolate the characters' plight to the larger picture of American society, which would have led to an interesting discussion as an audience.
One thing that seems profitable is the brand of comedy. And You The People are proof enough to prove that the person delivering the material is just as important. Dreyfus, Murphy, and Hill revel in recognizing the awkwardness and political incorrectness that akin to contemporary discourse on race relations on news shows and on the streets.
Overall
We've all been so careful about expressing our original ideas that when the morphed ones come out of our mouths, they just feel fake and insincere. While we get some good laughs, the satire suffers from a lack of brevity. It is not advanced and sleeps under the weight of publicity.
Barris must take much of the blame for these shortcomings. You leave the film with the feeling that a powerful opportunity was wasted and that a talented cast was let down by some of these creative choices. You People's finely tuned cultural sensibilities give it flavor, personality, and much-desired vibrancy, but the handling of themes and content makes the overall experience tedious and unsatisfying.