The film characterizes both Barack and Michelle beautifully - it's easy to momentarily forget who these people will become and just see them as complex human beings. She doesn't want it to be a date, but he clearly does, so they do the dance. I'm not sure how much of this is based on fact and how much of it is imagined (I assume most of the biographical details were fished out of Obama's autobiographies), but it imagines the two in their late 20s in Chicago in 1989. Michelle and Barack wouldn’t be the first couple who revealed most about themselves on the first date, before coupledom and marriage made them invisible to each other.Once you get over the weirdness of the fact that you're watching a movie about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date, this is an utterly charming and smart movie. Tanne’s dramatic licence means bringing in years of conversation and hindsight and compressing them into a few hours – but interestingly, perhaps it is closer to the truth than first appears. It is all a bit too good to be true and there are times when Southside With You has a TV movie feel. And it demonstrates all the nuances of race, class, gender politics and professional prestige far more interestingly and effectively than the usual “racism” moment.ĭid it all happen just like that? Well, of course not. That cleverly imagined scene puts on show Obama’s political acumen, diplomacy and instinct for negotiating with the white world. When Barack returns, a tense four-way conversation begins, and Barack smoothly finesses this boss’s objection to the violence that concludes the film, suggesting that it was a safety valve and that the aggressor would have anticipated the existence of an “insurance policy” to minimise damage. Then out in the lobby, while Barack is in the men’s room, Michelle is quietly mortified to run into her (white) bosses, who she fears will think the less of her professional credentials, in apparently going on some simpering date with a co-worker. He takes her to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (again, this really happened, encouraged by a rave review from celebrated Chicago critic Roger Ebert), where they watch the brutality of bigoted cops. Barack and Michelle do indeed encounter racism – on the movie screen. But on this point, Southside With You becomes interestingly, almost meta-textually sophisticated. If these people were fictional characters, they would almost certainly have an encounter with white racists, from which they would emerge shaken but determined, and brought closer together by the trauma. Michelle and Barack wouldn’t be the first couple who revealed most about themselves on the first date One subject they do not discuss is whether a woman should give up her career to be a wife and mom. They talk about their ambitions and Barack irritates her with a misjudged, patronising homily about how she’s obviously not fulfilled at work. Tanne imagines a later scene in a bar where she challenges him directly on not facing up to his emotions. They talk about Michelle’s hard-working idealistic parents, about Barack’s troubled background and his drunk dad. The road to the White House starts here … Southside With You Michelle is unimpressed by Barack’s swagger, disconcerted by the hole in the floor of his old car – and not exactly enamoured by the cigarettes he is smoking, though doesn’t mention it. Tanne has taken the accepted version of events and imagined the dialogue, ingeniously crafting a traditional romance within a walking-pace, real-time narrative, complete with meet-cute, breakup and makeup. Parker Sawyers is an eerily close likeness for the lanky, conceited, cigarette-smoking young Barack, a Harvard law student doing a summer associate programme at the prestigious a Chicago firm where he is mentored by beautiful, smart Michelle, played with charm and self-possession by Tika Sumpter. This date took in an art gallery, sandwiches in the park, a political meeting and a trip to the movies – culminating in the legendary first kiss on a bench outside the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, now commemorated by a plaque. It’s all about Barack and Michelle’s first date in the summer of 1989, when the future president met his (do I mean “her”?) future spouse in Chicago.
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