But he asked her out so much, he wore her down. He says she was reluctant to go on an official date with him. Michelle Robinson was a second-year associate, a practicing attorney and his advisor. He just finished his first year at Harvard Law School and was a summer associate at a Chicago corporate law firm. Barack and Michelle Obama's first date in Chicago back in 1989 is the subject of a new movie called "Southside With You." Film critic David Edelstein has a review.ĭAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: "Southside With You" is a dramatization of Barack and Michelle Obama's first date in 1989, which Obama wrote about briefly in his second book and has already become a piece of American folklore. It’s a pretty astounding moment in meta-cinema.This is FRESH AIR. Knowing his prowess as a public speaker, did he invite Michelle there just to see him strut his stuff? Hard to tell, but when Spike Lee’s Mookie hurls a trash can through the window of Sal’s Famous to rage against injustice, he’s also helping our hero Barack get the girl. The heart of the film, and the sequence that may cause some true believers to retrieve their hankies, is seeing young Barack rallying the disenfranchised members of the The Gardens, explaining that the way toward any goal is not to hate their adversary, but to try and understand them, and to switch the letters of every bureaucratic “no” into a rally “on”. We want these two to get together, and we want them to say things like: “I just want to do more to help out.” But Southside With You uses our affection for the Obamas to add urgency in the otherwise simple script. The surface-level comparison for the film is Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walking around various cities and falling in love) but that level of depth is very much lacking in writer-director Richard Tanne’s script. Considering the absurd lengths the rightwing has gone to defenestrate the man, and have yet to uncover any monkey business, it’s fair to say that their love is true. That said, by all accounts Barack and Michelle Obama are warm, caring people. It is, without question, pure hagiography. Films glorifying sitting leaders is a little more North Korea’s bag. To quote the 43 rd President of the United States, let me be clear: there’s something admittedly odd about Southside For You’s very existence. Some might argue his tenacity wasn’t exactly appropriate for the workplace, but Michelle’s true reason to decline invitations was more straightforward: if she, a black woman, were to date the first cute black man at the office, it would just get too many tongues wagging. Barack’s been haranguing Michelle for a date for some time but, since she is technically his advisor at the corporate firm where they work, she has demurred. He picks her up in his busted down car (forget the scuffs on Adlai Stevenson’s soles, the interior of Barack Obama’s late 80s ride had a full-blown hole in the floor) and – surprise – turns out the event isn’t for a few hours. Across town a man in an undershirt chats with his grandmother by telephone in-between cigarettes and says, “yes, her skin is of the darker persuasion.” This is how Barack met Michelle, and Southside With You will detail, in rather exaggerated, one-act-play form, how they fell in love. Is it a date? No, just a work associate, a Harvard law student with the firm for the summer, taking her to a community meeting to discuss “broken faucets and underfunded schools”. Her parents tease her as she fixes her hair. A twentysomething woman living at home prepares for a day out.
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