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Tuesday, March 26, 2019
MOVIE REVIEW/Us
Hell Across America--And In The Pit Of Your Soul, 2020
Lupita Nyong'o in Jordan Peele's "Us".
Universal Pictures
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Tuesday,
March 26,
2019
Early in "Us", Jordan Peele's much-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-winning "Get
Out", multiple pairs of eyes and mouths appear on a television set watched by a
little girl. Everything looks so sunny including the sound of a woman's
voice. But either side of the TV are VHS tapes, including "C.H.U.D."
There's "The Goonies" and "The Right Stuff". These mid-1980s titles are a
mix of horror, politics and patriotism, rectitude and goodness, adventure and
obstacle, all warring facets undergirding Mr. Peele's terrific and terrifying
sophomore effort, which also advises us that many abandoned tunnels and
underground subways are lurking and have no purpose at all.
It is the 1980s. A family of four led with laid-back Cliff Huxtable fervor
by Gabe (Winston Duke) is in peril when their Santa Cruz, California summer home
is invaded by red-clad left overs from "Night Of The Living Dead".
Doppelgangers. "Who are you people?", Gabe inquires. "Americans!"
one replies. This response hits a raw nerve, and the director tweaks us
out of our comfort zone to experience discomforts and feel implications beyond
the images we are absorbing. "Us" is a grand, highly thoughtful
allegorical journey into a realization that the right stuff isn't so right
anymore.
"Us" unearths truths about where we stand in America. When Gabe says it
will take 14 minutes for the police to arrive at their home, you know why.
(Surprise, surprise: the police never come, and never appear in "Us".) I
immediately thought of those 14 minutes as in fact the actual exact length of
the "Thriller" music video, a song about terror, horror, safety, innocence and
no easy escape.) The police would seemingly be the elixir against the rude
dopplegangers but they are also the fear, for they could end the lives of Gabe,
Adelaide and their kids in less than 14 seconds, or in 11. Ironies and
opposites gild "Us": the innocence and adult, parent and child, lines crossed or
not crossed and the passage of time and proximity to danger.
There's a serenity about Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o), confident under the most
intense cirumstances, though tearful when she sees her doppelganger who growls
instructions at her family. By then we've already seen a flashback of a
younger Adelaide, who can't shake the experience of seeing her identical self at
Santa Cruz many years before. Who said you can't go back in time?
After all, Adelaide's son (Evan Alex) travels back to the Seventies, and is a
wise old soul. His travel back in time is emblazoned on his t-shirt in the
shape of the movies: "Jaws", with the famous shark to boot.
Ever an examiner of the feral and fertive as he was in "Get Out", Mr. Peele
utilizes and maximizes film horror culture and establishes rustic surroundings,
dressing them in the idyllic comforts and take-it-for-granteds that make life
truly worth living, and he so deliciously savages these comforts by making the
safest and most intimate things in your life the most dangerous and horrific, to
great social commentary effect and outcome. "Us" packs its strongest
punches in these intimate moments, and when silence and comfort predominate "Us"
is at its most disquieting.
When "Us" explores the friends of Adelaide and Gabe (a Californicated drinking
white married couple played by "Handmaid's Tale" actor Elisabeth Moss and
comedian Tim Heidecker) Mr. Peele's points grow more acute, powerful and stark.
He exponentializes fear, artifice, superficiality, anxiety and male
ineffectualness for a ringing indictment of parts of American culture, beauty
notions and the way we live in this 21st century, so auto-pilot guided yet so
very dangerously lost. If the 1980s was the "me" generation decade in
America, then "Us" represents the "who are we?" generation. The director
provides clever insights and haunts us with scripture that is not only
foreboding but symbolically outposts the most primal terror of all: ourselves.
As the saying goes, "when you look deep into the abyss, the abyss also looks
deep into you." "Us" says that we haven't looked at ourselves honestly as
Americans, and that it will take one heck of a jolt, such as a revolt of an
underclass, to get us to reckon with ourselves. There are prices to be
paid, but even when one character meets an end a healthy dose of compassion and
peace arrives. Maybe all isn't lost with humanity.
Adelaide does things only a loving mother would do and as in "Get
Out", the mother-son dynamic in "Us" is a richly interesting aspect that had me
thinking well after the film ended. Mr. Peele attenuates the deepest fears
about ourselves in the most disturbing ways. Things so innate become so
horrible. Our human bond, which has been frayed, ruptured, destroyed and
decayed forever in the United States (US), is also overrun by the tyranny of our
very hearts. "Us" captures these terrors of the soul as cathartically and
beautifully as it does strokes of horror, contained yet combustible, even
downright explosive. Mr. Peele plunges us like a downward roller
coaster into the souls of these characters and leaves some scenarios remarkably
open-ended, adding to the frightening effects.
Mike Gioulakis's cinematography of Ms. Nyong'o in particular is arresting, and
she has never looked more beautiful on the big screen in a performance for the
ages, her best and most Oscar-nomination worthy. Mr. Peele has consciously
and refreshingly used darker-skinned Black actors in both his films now, to make
statements I think, to not only see a Black person on screen, but to show and
then crush weaponized racist stereotypes in over a century of Hollywood film.
And these are fine bold choices, playing on the racial stereotypes about darker
Black people already brought to the theatre beforehand by Black and white
audiences. Mr. Peele continues to give Black men a vulnerability and
awareness in his films, a broader actualization and context, and any physicality
is compromised. Gabe wears a big limp in the family, not the big pants in
the family.
"Us" makes no bones about its ability to unsettle and penetrate our minds, and
Mr. Peele employs equal parts nightmare and fantasy, and his densely-layered
warning film excels when polar opposites clash so seamlessly up against each
other as to be violent or violative. On various levels in "Us" we
experience how violence is taught at an early age, and how parents and children
react and talk about or around violence or other unsavory adult matters.
When Gabe is asked about a song being about drugs, he lies and jokes "it's a
dope song." Is this protection mode or disregard of a parental duty to
warn? "Don't do drugs," Gabe says blithely, in a way perhaps not
dissimilar from Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drugs campaign.
Great artists and filmmakers (and Mr. Peele is undoubtedly one of them) often
benefit from excellent timing. It is near impossible to have known that a
t-shirt with Michael Jackson's "Thriller" imprinted on it in a 2018 film version
of 1986 would have the profoundly unseemly and gravely problematic implications
and resonance it has in 2019. In "Us" it is the artifacts, those things
seen and unseen around the edges, those everyday things, that have the greatest,
most unforgettable impact and consequence. Is this all a real nightmare,
or a nightmare reality? Those two scenarios, like the doppelgangers in
"Us", are not necessarily the same.
With: Shahadi Wright Joseph, Madison Curry, Anna Diop, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II,
Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon.
"Us" is rated R by the Motion Picture Assocation of America for
violence/terror and language. The film running time is one hour and 56
minutes.
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