Jonah Hill co-writes, produces and stars in You People (now on Netflix) a very 2023 rom-com tackling thorny racial and cultural issues within the context of a classic families-feud-while-planning-the-wedding formula. Scripting alongside director Kenya Barris (creator of black-ish), Hill surrounds himself with considerable comedic talent, including rising stars Sam Jay, Lauren London and Molly Gordon, and gilded vets/former SNL comrades Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Eddie Murphy. Yes, it’s a somewhat rare Eddie Murphy sighting – he’s only been in four feature films in the past 10 years – which means the movie HAS to be good, right? With that much talent, it kinda better be!
The Gist: Ezra Cohen (Hill) is a financial broker with a podcast, but don’t worry, you’ll soon like him in spite of that. He describes himself as a “West-L.A. Jew.” He’s a shoe hound, loves hip-hop and, in the words of his younger sister Liza (Gordon), looks like “a dad who lost his kid at Coachella.” He and podcast co-host Mo (Jay) chat about American melting-pot culture and then he schleps to the office to stare into space at his desk because his heart just ain’t in it. He’s single and a bit lonely, but that comes to an end when he – sigh – jumps into the wrong car thinking it’s his Uber. And that’s how he cutely meets Amira Mohammed (London), a costume designer who doesn’t bat an eye when he shows up to their first date in a tie-dye sweatsuit. An utterly adorbs cute-dates montage follows and they buy the same sneakers and wear the same sneakers at the same time and it’s love love love. Did you notice that she’s Black and he’s White and the world around them is in turmoil but none of that matters when you’re innnnnnnnn lllllooooovvve.
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SIX MONTHS LATER. You know what has to happen six months later. Yes – they must Meet The Parents. They go to the Cohen home in Brentwood and it’s so spacious and has so much natural light you’d think it was built 48 inches from the surface of the sun. Ezra’s parents are Arnold (David Duchovny, whose presence barely registers here), a podiatrist who’s the son of a podiatrist and the grandson of a podiatrist, and Shelley (Louis-Dreyfus), who feels the need to bring up to Amira how terrible the police treat Black people, and now we know where Ezra learned how to ramble and stammer and yammer and flail and dig his way into his own grave when he’s nervous and thorny topics emerge. He buys an engagement ring and that’s when he meets Akbar (Murphy) and Fatima Mohammed (Nia Long) for the first time, an ask-for-their-blessing lunch during which he learns just how intense Amira’s father is. “So you want to marry my daughter?”, he says. “You can try.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?:You People finds the happy(ish) medium between Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Meet the Parents.
Performance Worth Watching: Murphy is transfixing and subtly hilarious as an ice-cold Concerned Dad who also has all his blades sharpened so he can slash apart any inference of White privilege. His pointed line readings contrast quite effectively with Hill’s fishing-around-for-the-funny improvisational style, e.g. the following Memorable Dialogue:
Memorable Dialogue: Akbar crashes Ezra’s coke-and-strippers Vegas bachelor party:
Akbar: You shit on yourself the last time you was here? You shat your slacks?
Ezra: Yes, but not from cocaine. It was from Chipotle.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: If only You People made better use of the Hill-Murphy dynamic. It aims to freshen up a weary rom-com blueprint with contemporary subject matter, and the result is mixed-race mixed bag. It’s hampered by a serious case of Nobody Acts Like This, which clashes with the film’s insistence upon tackling the way Americans of vastly diverse backgrounds communicate with each other.
Hill and London – the former as genial a presence as ever, and the latter doing her best with an underwritten character – play millennial-age people whose unforced progressiveness, at least partially a product of their generation, is routinely hampered by the baggage of their parents’ experiences. Such is the core conflict beneath the movie’s broad comedic machinery, and that tug-of-war feels genuine until, say, Louis-Dreyfus’ character, a brutal extrapolation of the famously fatal White-liberal “I would’ve voted for Obama a third time if I could” line from Get Out, never shuts up and keeps crossing one line after another after another. It’s funny for a moment, and we cringe, and then it gets ridiculous, and we want it to stop.
I could play apologist and assert that Hill and Barris employ purposeful exaggeration in an attempt to soften the movie’s edges with comedy and land on a love-conquers-all message. But that would be a step too generous, because the film’s balance of vexatious realities and outright silliness feels off; there’s a way to update the old cringeworthy-dinner-party scene for a new era, but ending with wacky slapstick ain’t it.
You People might be more functional if it wasn’t so timid in its satire, or if it leaned into the earnestness of the love between its primary characters (it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, but The Farewell is a fine example of tone-setting in a modern comedy). The film toys around with stereotypes that aren’t dated by standards of the 2020s, but are nonetheless stereotypes. It feels lazy, dithering about on mushy medium ground, raising nigh-impossible issues but resolving them in such a simplistic manner.
Our Call: SKIP IT. You People has its moments, and might be worth watching for Murphy’s performance alone. But it never comes together as either a consistent laugh generator or potent slice of cultural commentary.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
