Southside With You

The opening credits of "Southside With You," writer-director Richard Tanne's film about the Obamas' first date, are set to Janet Jackson's bombastic "Miss You Much."  The credit font is very '80s, scribbles in hot pink.  The message is clear: this will be a different sort of story about the First Couple, one that brings them back down to earth from the rarefied heights they've reached.

Tanne has compared his film to Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy.  It's an apt comparison in terms of structure; like those movies, this one follows a couple over the course of a few hours.  But the "Before" characters are fictional.  They can be used as constructs to discuss matters of youth, romance, parenting.  The Obamas are flesh and blood people, and on a first date they spend much of their time recounting biographical details that are already familiar to viewers--or could be easily learned about elsewhere.  Barack's tussling with the ghost of his father is much less resonant in a film when the real one already wrote an entire book on the subject.

Tanne does try to communicate the everyday struggles of a young Barack and Michelle, which mostly center around their challenges as young black lawyers at a prestigious firm dominated by whites.  But he can't resist throwing in a speech to a community group about the diversity of our nation that sounds an awful lot like a warm-up for Barack's 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Tanne's tin ear for dialogue doesn't help.  (After the speech, Michelle says, "Thank you for inviting me.  It's been a while since I've been in contact with real-life issues like that.")  But his bigger problem might be that a movie like this simply isn't worthwhile.  The Obamas aren't some distant figures from history; we already know them quite well.  They appear on late-night talk shows.  They do the Dougie.  They tweet.  They're not even out of the White House yet.  It will be some time before we can say that we miss them much.