Movies about Barack Obama are definitely coming. The eight years he’s served as America’s first black President have had a distinctly cinematic air, and the towering, Oscar-baiting epics depicting this are inevitable. The first to arrive, perhaps appropriately enough, goes for a smaller, more understated portrayal.
Southside with You is a modest and sweet-hearted two-hander about Obama’s first date with Michelle Robinson, his future First Lady and a public figure with intrigue and distinction all her own. The film takes place over the course of a single day, observing the same light and somewhat dreamy style of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. But Southside has an obvious obstacle those films didn’t: overcoming real life.
The question then becomes: How does a relatively minuscule film handle the seemingly overbearing presence of its primary subjects? Director Richard Tanne, alongside actors Parker Sawyers (Barack) and Tika Sumpter (Michelle), pulls it off by emboldening small details from the couple’s personal lives while carefully infusing them with the historical arc of their political lives.
The approach results in a unique mixture of sweeping biopic and small-scale romance. The story itself—centering on a summer day in 1989 when Barack, then a Harvard law student interning at a law firm in Chicago, takes colleague Michelle to a community meeting on the city’s south side—adheres closely to the latter. The date begins with the future couple disagreeing on whether or not their rendezvous is, in fact, a date. Barack has had his sites set on the ambitious Michelle ever since joining the firm.
Michelle, his superior and advisor at work, has quite understandably rebuked his advances for fear of appearing unprofessional. The resultant discourse— “Yes, we are on a date” versus “No, we are not on a date”—is a common enough staple in romantic comedies and TV sitcoms. Serving a similar purpose here, it reveals Barack’s romantic and somewhat heedless tendencies against Michelle’s more straight-laced, professional demeanor. But this also underlines the determined nature of two very headstrong people, suggesting this sort of rhetorical dialogue is perhaps inherent in those of a political disposition. In this, the multiple dimensions of their relationship are revealed gracefully, and with sizeable wit.
The subtle way Tanne mixes somewhat generic situations with genuine insight into his lead characters puts Southside in a different category than the Before films. The couple in the Linklater series has unique qualities and characterizations unto themselves, but they’re also broadly representative of relationships in general, honing in on the way a person’s perspective on love and companionship can shift at various stages in life. Tanne’s Barack and Michelle have a similarly generalized element, one designed to make them sympathetic to viewers with differing political ideologies, but he doesn’t entirely forgo the specificity inherent in the film’s protagonists.
This approach, while admirable, unfortunately results in several clunky sequences. Both Barack’s passionate address at the community event and the couple’s weighing of his getting into politics stumble; “You definitely have a knack for speeches,” she tells him. But in the film’s best moments, like the stunning stretch the couple spend viewing an African-American art exhibit and the emotional yet intriguingly anticlimactic moment in which they share their first kiss, Tanne manages to present two fully-realized, wholly realistic characters.
A film like this—visually unambitious, driven by character interplay—lives and dies by the strength of the central performances. Capable as they are, Sawyers and Sumpter tend to overcompensate for the film’s lack of driving action, their portrayals occasionally coming off as excessive and unnatural. They also lack the support of an important third character: the city itself. Chicago never emerges as an integral component of the film’s makeup or, more crucially, the characters’ identity.
Chicago’s sights and sounds, particularly those of the south side, go largely undocumented by Tanne’s camera. Any attempt to do so, like the fully fictionalized moment when Michelle dances with an African drum troupe after visiting the art exhibit, comes off as forced and inauthentic. Both the reality and myth of Barack and Michelle are intrinsically tied to the Second City. But in the film’s most glaring flaw, there’s a strange and disheartening distance between them, as if the Obamas and Chicago are simply subject and setting rather than existing symbiotically.
Southside with You might not have much to do with the actual South Side of Chicago, but that might be because Tanne is after something else. As a piece of historical docu-fiction, the film is more than the sum of its parts. It has stakes and substance that reach beyond the couple’s immediate narrative, let alone their immediate surroundings. In the fictionalized Barack and Michelle, Tanne has selected contemporary subjects of great historical and political importance and approached them in the same tender and familiar manner one might a close friend or relative. Forgoing hagiography, it instead offers a humanistic look at its well-known subjects. Southside with You is an enlightened realization of history as we perceive it and life as we know it.
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