You People

There was a neat sketch on Saturday Night Live at the weekend, reason enough for comment. The set-up was a Big Hollywood Movie Quiz for a familiar kind of big-screen aficionado, but when the subject turns to what’s on streaming, the cinema buffs have no knowledge to offer whatsoever. That sketch hits a target; since the pandemic fragmented our culture and reduced our communal, shared experiences, a chunk of potential audiences have just given up on cinema, and are content to watch whatever reheated slop streamers serve up instead. Thus You People is the top movie on Netflix right now, and has been for some time, yet despite a top notch cast and an edgy, contemporary subject matter, there’s not much online debate, discussion or controversy about it.

In essence, this is a racially-themed rom-com; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? would be seen as the obvious predecessor. But while that film had Sidney Poitier as a too- good-to-be true potential partner that eventually pleases his white in-laws, You People inverts the equation, as we might expect from director Kenya Barris, creator of blackish. The suitor here is the less-than-perfect Ezra Cohen, played by Jonah Hill with a Hemingway beard, a ‘white Barry White’ podcaster who is introduced as ‘the Jew with nothing to do’. Ezra’s dilettante ways are changed when he meets Amira Mohammed (Lauran London); we don’t see much of the process by which they overcome racial barriers to fall in love, but we do zero in on the immediate aftermath. Ezra’s parents Arnold and Shelley (David Duchovny and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) are keen, perhaps too keen to welcome Amira to their family, but Ezra has a tougher time with Amira’s folks, Akbar and Fatima, played by Eddie Murphy and Nia Long. Black is one thing, but Muslim is another, and Ezra and Amir find they have an uphill struggle to win the approval of their in-laws…

With some vintage 70’s stars in support (Richard Benjamin! Elliott Gould!), You People attempts to go back to the cutting edge of racial comedy, or at least troll us a little, and a game cast throw themselves into proceedings which, apart from a contrived moment of Dreyfus setting fire to Murphy’s hat, steer clear of slapstick and aim instead at observational humour. Despite the beard, Hill is a highly recognisable star, but also has a certain modern attitude that You People plays into; Hill co-writes, and some of the language and references feel very much in his usual wheelhouse. “They made me take a vaccine to go to the casino’ says Murphy, and Duchovny also hits the spot with his inappropriate piano-playing scene.

You People ends up with a very limp final stretch in which apologies are made and the world righted with painfully contrived ease; it’s got a feel-good ending that it doesn’t really deserve. But it’s also a passably enjoyable light watch, name-checking hot-button topics like police brutality as part of a genial ‘celebrating our differences’ comedy. But a scene in which Ezra refuses to do cocaine with his friends in a stag-party do in a strip club sends out a mixed message; all the sentiment about race and religion seems beside the point when women seem to be treated so casually and thoughtlessly as an underclass. You People sets out to deliver a shock to the system by playing with racial and religious edges, but ends up playing out conventional sitcom tropes.