Director: Kobi Libii
Writer: Kobi Libii
Stars: Justice Smith, David Alan Grier, An-Li Bogan
Synopsis: A young man is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who dedicate their lives to a cause of utmost importance: making white people’s lives easier.
One of the first promos I saw for Kobi Libii’s debut feature, The American Society of Magical Negroes, placed the film’s actors in a sort of jokey standoff. Stars Justice Smith, An-Li Bogan, and David Alan Grier all invited audiences to come see “their” new movie, each actor playfully ribbing the next as they placed an emphasis on the fact that the film they were all promoting was theirs. (“Check out the trailer for my new movie…”, “I think you mean my new movie…”, etc.) This sort of banter has become an oddly trendy way to introduce trailers to audiences; the cringiest version came from Anyone But You stars Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney — and was later parodied by Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as they promoted their show, The Curse. But the key to this bit, in all its iterations, is a cast-wide understanding of the truth behind it: That these movies belong more to duos or ensembles than they do to one character, and are better off for it.
What none of these trailer intros make an attempt to do, understandably, is try to make a case for what ideas the film in question is in service of. That’s up to the movie itself to illustrate, and for those viewing it critically to dissect in the aftermath. A film like Anyone But You is easy: a sexy rom-com with ambitions to serve as catnip for audiences seeking a throwback to genre movies of yore. Something like The American Society of Magical Negroes, however, is a more complex case. Does it wish to push buttons? Or to cause audiences to consider their own behavior in regards to the subject matter, something deeper, something unintentionally malignant, perhaps? Maybe it’s setting out to take a reasonably well-known trope — the “magical negro” refers to a Black character whose primary reason for existence is to help further a White protagonist’s journey — and flip it on its head.
On the surface, each of these answers could ostensibly apply to Libii’s film. It markets itself as a satire, a think piece, and an argument for individual reckoning all rolled into one. But The American Society of Magical Negroes has other ambitions, too: it aims to charm you, to make you laugh, to make its potentially-discomfiting title and overarching premise more digestible. Or, at least, that’s what it appears to want to do. And therein lies the problem.
A goal-ridden film like Libii’s should be ambitious, but so often do we see directors — not just first timers, though they make up a sizable chunk of this population — miss the trees for the forest, not the other way around, due to an insistence on being liked rather than being properly understood. It’s not that Society shouldn’t be charming or funny, but that it shouldn’t cloak itself in a security blanket woven together by those elements. In other words, it’s a film that should and could be far more challenging, if only it wasn’t so hell-bent on being winsome.
It’s the story of Los Angeles-based artist, Aren (Justice Smith, quickly becoming the go-to actor for delightfully anxious millennial parts, and for good reason), who has a penchant for pieces made out of yarn that no one understands. After a particularly disastrous gallery showing, at which one White patron mistakes him for a waiter, he’s approached by Roger (David Alan Grier) who promises a more fulfilling life should he join the titular underground society. They work, Roger explains in so many words, to make White people feel better about themselves, thus making the world a safer place for Black people. Indeed, they do so with a little dash of wizardry.
Aren’s first full-time client is a tech bro named Jason (Drew Tarver) who is undeservingly in line for a promotion at MeetBox, a unimaginatively-conjured software company with a Musk-esque CEO (Rupert Friend) where employees spend more time playing ping pong and ordering juices of varied greenness than they do coding or designing. Well, most of them, that is: Lizzie (a lovely An-Li Bogan) is one step below Jason in staff hierarchy but eons above him in talent and drive. Jason not only sees Lizzie as his “work wife”, but also happens to have feelings for her. And despite the fact that those feelings seem to come from a place of general attraction/convenience and not, say, actually knowing her, furthering Jason’s romantic prospects becomes Aren’s primary duty.
Which is a bummer, because Aren, having had a coffee-shop meet-cute with Lizzie mere moments before his first day on the job and, more importantly, having developed a true connection with this workplace paramour, now has to choose between his responsibilities to the society and his feelings. But the whole point of their work is to set aside their feelings in order to make the world a better place for all, even if a more appropriate phrasing for “better” might be “easier for White people, safer for Black lives.”
Yet, just as Aren is anxiously conflicted between his work for the society and exploring a love connection — not to mention that if his personal interests take precedence over the society’s goals, every member could lose their powers — it seems that Libii is caught between two complementary elements of a single narrative without ever really fleshing the more important one out. The satirical nature of Society does, indeed, feel shorthanded, as though Libii felt he couldn’t fortify the so-called central pillar of his plot without amplifying the presence of what should have remained a secondary beat to the far-more important one.
There is a cavernous distance between a film with provocative aspirations and one that succeeds in provoking. The issue with The American Society of Magical Negroes is that, despite its window-dressing, it seems to possess neither. There are ideas aplenty to back a trio of good-not-great performances from Smith, Bogan, and Grier; but whatever substance those ideas might have once contained seems to have been stripped out in favor of a film that more resembles a stunted, by-the-numbers rom-com than the film its clever prompt suggests.
The closest it ever comes to causing a stir is with its “climax”, when Aren predictably unloads all of the pent up frustration he’s had to push aside in favor of the society’s best interests in a speech littered with schlocky one-liners about heavy racial anxieties and fears. And while Smith’s performance, both here and over the course of the film as a whole, stands tall, the sequence in question merely limits Society’s objectives even more than they already have been.
It’s a shame how short Libii’s debut comes up, considering how well-attuned the director appears to be when it comes to how successful some stories of this nature have been in the past. In a pre-release featurette for the film, he noted that, culturally, “we’re pretty good about telling stories about overt racism — slavery stories, legal discrimination — because they’re visual. But the more common microaggressions are incredibly hard to pin down.” If only his own attempt at pinning them down wasn’t so ham-handed.
