Low energy

I can't profess to be an expert on Kenya Barris. I probably should be, considering that I have a friend who wrote for the show he created, Black-ish, for many years. That show has existed entirely since I moved to Australia and lost my connection to network television, so I haven't seen a single episode.

But I've consumed some Barris in recent years, and I'm starting to get an idea of his style. Which can be described thus:

Low energy.

That describes the remake of White Men Can't Jump, which he wrote and produced, to a T.

What do I mean by low energy?

Characters have no distinctive facial expressions. They talk out of the sides of their mouths. Even the extremities of emotion result in no real change in their outward appearance. Any comedic bit is played at the lowest possible wattage, such that you're not even sure it's a comedic bit.

Only with the benefit of having seen White Men Can't Jump do I realize this is kind of what I was getting at in my review of You People, which he wrote and directed (and produced) earlier this year. Here is what I wrote about that film's uneasy relationship with laughs:

And so the result is that there are not a lot of laughs, a problematic outcome when the movie is structured as a series of outrageous set pieces in a standard comedy format. As you’re watching, you can tell the scene calls for a laugh, if you are at all a student of how these films are written. The punchline, though, is usually a cringe rather than a laugh, and sometimes these seem exaggerated beyond what might really happen. And while cringeing is valuable, especially since it forces you to confront the true irreconcilable differences being explored here, you sometimes get the impression the filmmakers wanted the laugh but couldn’t deliver.

Prompting cringes is, of course, different than low/no energy. There's quite a bit of cringey racial humor in White Men Can't Jump, too. But I think it all goes into this vaguely contemptuous mode that Barris brings to the screen, where characters are "low key" disdainful of each other (I hate the phrase "low key" but it applies here), which manifests itself in a flatness in which minimum effort is required or displayed.

What I am now realizing is Barris' style, an intentional choice, first registered to me as a total lack of charisma by Jump stars Jack Harlow and Sinqua Walls. I have no experience with Harlow, but seeing that he is a rapper made me roll my eyes a bit. Just because you can rap doesn't mean you can act, especially if you are a white rapper, I would argue. 

With Walls, though, I know he can act. He was my favorite part of the admirable but ultimately unsuccessful horror film Nanny from last year, where his personality, playing a doorman at the building where the title character works, shined through easily. In Jump, Walls seems almost challenged by the material, so limited is the range of his emoting -- which I now attribute to choices by Barris and director Calmatic.

I might not have this impression of Barris had it not been for my primary example of seeing him on screen as an actor. That was in his 2020 Netflix show BlackAF#, a lightly fictionalized version of Barris' own life in which Rashida Jones plays his wife and there are about four or five kids in the family. The limited range to his performance style may be an indication of the fact that he is not, first and foremost, an actor. However, it also seems to be an extension of this philosophy of not giving another person, especially another person who can be described as a fool you have to suffer, any bit more of your personal energy than absolutely necessary. The result was a weird disconnect in the narrative payoffs of that show, whose 35-minute running time for episodes was also a violation of normal situation comedy rules. In the end part of each episode where Barris, playing in many ways the typical sitcom dad, is supposed to be on the receiving end of a mild comeuppance, he instead proved himself the smarter -- or on the receiving end of such a mild comeuppance that it could barely be recognized as such.

We of course have to pause here to discuss the elephant in the room, which You People spends its entire running time discussing: race. There is every chance that Barris has made a choice to limit the range of emotions of his characters to counteract a long and pernicious history of Black characters asked to play the fool and dance around like clowns. Cinema history has had enough of that and Barris does not need to oblige anyone's desire to see a single minute more of it. 

I'm not sure the opposite of clowning, though, is having so little affect that it is confused for a total deficit of charisma. And that's what comes across to me in the performances of Harlow (who is of course white), Walls, and other characters in White Men Can't Jump. The whole film feels like it exists within parentheses, asserting its existence so lightly that it never grabs hold of us and certainly never builds any narrative momentum toward a climax. This may be a choice, but it is the wrong one dramatically for a film like this, if the result is so bland and so parenthetical.

The thing is, Barris isn't so far removed from a movie in which this was not the predominating style. In reviewing his IMDB credits, I am reminded that Barris co-wrote the 2017 film Girls Trip, which was a true favorite of mine that year. I'm not sure you could enforce a stultifying performance style on this film's MVP foursome: Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Queen Latifah and Tiffany Haddish. But at that time, maybe Barris wasn't trying to either. Which means he can get back there. (He also co-wrote Coming 2 America, which maybe isn't guilty of the same issues either. But that film didn't entirely work for me so it's not a great example in the current discussion.)

I suppose we also have to acknowledge what we are comparing it to. In the original White Men Can't Jump, the jump-off-the-screen charisma of Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez is a thing to be reckoned with. You can't walk away from any ten-minute slice of that movie without a lasting impression of the personality of these characters. They may go big sometimes, but it's an equal opportunity bigness, where you have a Black man, a white man and a Latinx woman all acting at the same volume. And it's the volume we need for a comedy. Their performances are what have made that movie an enduring comedic classic in certain circles.

Barris has turned the volume way down on everyone in his movie. There may be good intentions behind it, but the results are entirely forgettable. Not only will 2023's White Men Can't Jump not endure over the years, it may not even endure over the course of the weekend in which you watch it.