kenya barriscreator of the television show ‘black-ish’, signed an agreement with Netflix valued at $100 million that ended abruptly less than three years later. At that time, Barris only premiered ‘#blackAF’, one of those series that the platform did not hesitate to cancel despite having previously renewed it, but it was still to come. ‘People like you’his first feature film as a director.
It cannot be said that Barris has opted for something revolutionary for his first film, since ‘People like you’ is a romantic comedy clearly indebted to ‘Guess who’s coming tonight’ and the multitude of similar productions that were released in subsequent decades. Fortunately, It has a good cast so that everything looks better and ends up being an entertaining proposal.
An impossible love?
Do not expect the slightest surprise in the purely plot. ‘People like you’ follow the boy meets girl structure by heartThey both fall in love but then a problem arises that seems insurmountable and could end their relationship. We all know how that is going to end and Barris’s film is no exception.
What is striking is that Barris manages the most common excesses in this type of production quite well without really giving up on them. For example, no one would have been surprised to see a eddy murphy unleashed as Akbar, especially when his goal for most of the footage is to make life miserable for Ezra (Jonah Hill), but when it comes down to it, he opts for a very measured calm and without resorting to excessively underlining his condition as a threat as ‘Her parents’ did with Robert De Niro.
That doesn’t mean that you don’t always play with the contrast, whether it’s between characters -there’s Ezra’s somewhat neurotic mother played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus It also makes Amira’s existence quite bitter. Lauren London– or by the situations that are happening -especially funny is a moment in which Akbar backfires when testing something that Ezra had previously said-, but always keeping everything under control.
I am aware that there will be moments that perhaps they could have looked better if they had let their hair down, but Barris’s bet helps that ‘People like you’ never stop losing a certain sense of naturalness that makes what is being told closer to the public -and that also applies to its technical and visual finish-. The fact of allowing yourself to joke around a bit with topics that you don’t usually get into too much like the Holocaust or slavery also adds in that direction.
Other details of ‘People like you’
However, at all times it is clear that this does not cease to be a small layer of varnish for what is still the same as always. That feeling is sharpened during the final minutes, where the dramatic (although without exceeding it either, do not expect a great tearful moment or something like that) comes to the fore so that everything reaches the expected and desired direction.
It is true that the comic is clearly prioritized over the romantic, but watch out for the good chemistry that Hill and London share, a key detail so that what can happen with that couple matters to us beyond how fun the movie is. There are times when one of the two protagonists is sacrificed to focus more on the troubles that happen to the other, but one of the keys here is that we see the browns that both have to face.
By the way, that allows more time on the screen for both Dreyfus and Murphy, who it is true that they have shown more on other occasions, but that does not mean that they are quite funny here and know how to play with that contrast that Barris is looking for in everything. moment. To them we must add more secondary characters such as an inspired David Duchovny like the father in Hill’s fiction or even others who may only appear in one or two scenes to add a little more spark to the film.
In short
‘People like you’ is an entertaining movie which has its best asset in its actors, because for the rest it is a little more of the same -something especially evident during its last 15-20 minutes- although seasoned with some funny dialogues. The same Netflix spent including itself among its most powerful film releases of the year, but you don’t spend a bad time watching it.
In Espinof: