Kobi Libii’s directorial debut delivers some solid laughs, but his exploration of a tired and problematic trope fails to deliver when the narrative needs it most.
American Society of Magical Negroes
Directed by Kobi Libii
Starring Justice Smith, An-Li Bogan, David Allen Grier, Nicole Byer, Rupert Grint, Drew Tarver
Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Synopsis
Aren (Smith) is a failed sculptor who has reached his lowest point when Roger (Grier) appears suddenly, offering him a job as a magical negro, one who protects the feelings of White Americans in order to preserve the peace for Black America.
One Flawed Premise Sets Up More Flaws
When I watched the first trailer for American Society, I was immediately worried because of the rom-com vibes. It set off red flags that director / writer Kobi Libii didn’t have a grasp on the complicated racial history of the magical negro trope. Why on Earth would you want to tackle such a complicated trope through a film genre that’s not really known for being nuanced and subtle?
In hindsight, while those concerns were valid for different reasons, I can now see why the rom-com genre could work. Placing an extremely meek character into a love triangle forces them to wrestle with the totality of their emotions. This springboard gives us glimpses into different areas that Aren is struggling with, between his new magical role with the Society, his affection for Lizzie (Bogan), and his struggle as a Black man within a largely white company and the mountain of aggressions he has to contend with.
Credit: Focus Features
However, since the narrative doesn’t understand the inherent problems with love triangles or rom-coms in general, it unfortunately falls into the same problematic behaviors that make us groan or roll our eyes at the protagonists and antagonists. I could rant about the issues with this genre for a while, but let’s address the two biggest problems:
One, the key issue with a love triangle is honesty: someone or multiple people in the triangle are not being honest about their feelings, which is the chief driver of friction and continued misunderstandings within the group. Sure, you can point to plot contrivances like “I just missed the train” and thus missed your opportunity to express your feelings, or one character is being indecisive, but that misses the key point: the characters haven’t done the work to express themselves and the audience is expected to be sympathetic despite few signs we should be.
Two, and probably most pressing, is that rom-com characters are written as absolutely horrendous human beings, allowed to get away with truly terrible things in the name of comedy. I love Julia Roberts as much as the next person, but it’s easy to forget how many terrible acts her character commits in My Best Friends Wedding, all so she can avoid expressing her feelings. The depth and damage of her lies would be enough for some couples to file divorce, yet it’s played for laughs in the “it’s okay, we’ve all been there” kind of way that simply doesn’t fit with reality.
In our American Society love triangle, these issues are split among the trio in varying degrees. With Aren, you’re so focused on his lack of confidence and meek nature shielding him from the aggression of white people, you’ll quickly forget that he’s a prime example of issue #1. He can’t express his feelings towards Lizzie due to a plot contrivance, and this friction becomes a key point in his break with the Society. Lizzie suffers from similar issues as she doesn’t express her feelings clearly to Aren (due to a similar plot contrivance, more on that later), and both characters are sort of in a holding pattern until the script finally remembers it needs to resolve this tension, to hilarious and annoying effect.
Credit: Focus Features
Jason, played by Drew Tarver, is where the movie decides to dump most of their problematic character traits (issue #2) while stylized under the trappings of whiteness. Honestly, most of the white characters are caricatures of real human beings, which makes it hard to take any of their decisions seriously or care about the impact of their actions, even when it affects our protagonist Aren. Caricatures can be an effective comedic tool when used correctly (and when avoiding offensive stereotypes), but Jason is the butt of nearly every white joke towards the later half of the film. If the narrative had taken him seriously while dumping the more comedic elements onto the other white characters, it would have made the love triangle stronger. As it stands, it makes Aren and Lizzie look moronic for even entertaining Jason as a viable love interest, given how inept he acts.
Lizzie escapes the worst of the rom-com bugs, but there’s a plot point that’s revealed later as a clever “gotcha” that strips her agency. I’m sure Libii likely thought he was really doing something incredible with this last-minute twist, but think about it for more than 5 minutes, and you’ll quickly see why this change is just as problematic as the other issues laid out here. To explain, I’ll need to talk about some spoilers so I’ll save that for the end of this review, but suffice it to say, it felt like a last minute addition that the ramifications and impact weren’t completely considered.
It’s Funny and Deep…But
There are legitimately some great laughs to be had between Aren and Roger, the occasional joke set-up between the love triangle, and other members of the Society. However, there’s so many awkward pauses and tension killers throughout the movie that you’ll find yourself wincing at many of the jokes. Now, some of these jokes are great callbacks to other magical negroes throughout film history, especially The Green Mile (1999), where the late Michael Clarke Duncan plays an inmate with magical powers who helps his warden and prison guards. This joke and reference may generate the funniest moments of the film, but they are woven in between many awkward moments where the comedic momentum goes nowhere.
The few deep moments near the end shouldn’t get ignored just because the whole film doesn’t gel together. Aren and Roger have an incredibly deep moment talking about past flames, Aren and Lizzie have a great conversation displaying their chemistry, and lastly, Aren has a monologue at his job that’s so good it’s destined to get clipped and reshared across social media once this film releases on streaming. It’s the crux of Aren’s arc and the growth he needed to have, while also serving as a rebuke of the way his fellow white coworkers treat him.
Credit: Focus Features
However, this emotional impact ignores the problematic role that the Society has put him in. It’s like setting up your film to recreate the debate between activists W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, which, in simple terms, was the difference between the pursuit of full Black equality / civil rights (Du Bois) vs. an appeasement, model minority path (Washington). Except, and this is the key point, your narrative never rebuked Washington’s position for the problems it could perpetuate. Libii clearly understands why this Hollywood stereotype is bad but fails to actually offer any meaningful critiques of the people perpetuating it.
Conclusion / Recommendation
Every concern you had about this movie walking into it is, unfortunately, validated by many poor decisions, the largest of which was placing this within a rom-com context without understanding how that could impact or undermine the characters. While you can watch this one for the laughs, it’s not going to resonate with the intended audience past a few “ah-ha” moments and Aren’s impassioned monologue near the end.
I can’t recommend that you watch this in theaters, there’s nothing here that stands out in a cinematic context and this one feels destined to get recycled through TikTok videos that will do a better job explaining the issue than this movie attempted.
Score: 4.6 out of 10
- Wasted Premise- 5
- While Libii definitely explores the concept, his interpretation or remedy for the problem leaves a lot to be desired.
- Comedic Promise- 6
- There’s plenty of laughs to be had with American Society, but some odd editing choices and dead space harms some of the better-constructed jokes and callbacks.
- Weak Strawman Characters- 3
- There’s going to be a segment of the internet that feels scorned by how the white characters are portrayed, and they are, unfortunately, right. Give them a bit more teeth, and the friction would be better, but no one likes punching a paper bag; it’s insulting to your better-written characters and wastes the audience’s time.
Additional, **Potential Spoiler** Thoughts
What is a Magical Negro?
To understand what a Magical Negro is, you first need to understand what a Mammy is.
The Mammy archetype represents the white slave owner’s ideal, docile Black slave (which eventually turns into Black servant / worker), who is overly happy and/or enjoys their servitude, serving as an integral member to a plantation’s inner crew or staff. While they may still exhibit some blackness in the way they carry themselves, they think about the needs of their master / boss first, not their own discomfort and needs.
Credit: MGM
The archetype is born out of real-life differences in the way field and house slaves were treated since acting reserved, docile, meek, and obedient typically afforded you better options as opposed to consistent defiance in the face of oppression. This difference also reinforced issues of colorism between Black people, as lighter-skinned slaves or mixed-race slaves (who were likely the result of rape) typically had easier access to house jobs or less physically demanding work while the most grueling labor was reserved for darker skin slaves (more on this later).
The key distinction between the house slave and their “Mammy” depiction, though is that the smiles and laughter brought by a house slave weren’t by choice: they were doing that to survive the day. I’m quite sure there were Black house slaves who were quite cozy and allured by the potential safety of operating in the plantation, akin to Samuel L Jackson’s character of Stephen in Django Unchained (2012). He’s never worried about his own safety, even crying over antagonist Calvin Candy’s dead body as bullets whiz by his head. But that experience was not the norm, and even the divisive colorism wedge driven between Black slaves acknowledged that truth when it came to moments of solidarity.
Credit: Sony / Columbia Pictures
However, what started as a stereotype would become a literary and later cinematic archetype after the success of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which reinforced the Mammy idea to millions as it doubled down on racial caricatures even while being a strong abolitionist narrative. This idea would later be taken up by various pro-slavery writers and other areas of pop culture as various images of the Mammy / Uncle Tom appeared post-Civil War to combat the idea of slavery being a horrific practice. Essentially, guilty white folks shielded themselves from Abolitionist and Reconstruction-era racial criticism by pointing to the Mammy / Uncle Tom idea as a good representation of slavery times, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Fast-forward to early Hollywood’s depiction of Black people and you’ll see Mammy / Uncle Tom characters left and right as these were some of the only jobs that Black performers could get outside of dancing and singing, which could still require several compromises (wearing blackface, shucking and jiving, etc.) that effectively echoed or continued the worst elements of minstrel shows.
As imagery of the Mammy / Uncle Tom archetype fell out of favor with more and more Black performers, especially as they helmed their own productions and got better roles, the archetype changed to include more support roles…with a catch. Now these peripheral characters started to show up randomly or with no real narrative connection. A Black janitor may show up to deliver a key piece of wisdom, fix something a character desperately needs in order to move forward, a wholesome Black driver may chauffeur your slightly racist grandmother around and dole out helpful pieces of advice. Hell, even God himself may come down in the body of a Black man to handle a white character’s life issues.
Credit: Universal Pictures
Now none of this sounds “magical” on paper until you realize many of them pop up from nowhere, vanish just as quickly as they came, heal the white protagonist, or bestow a gift onto their fellow man, especially when the characters aren’t cast as an actual deity. They sometimes exist only to be magical and that’s it, they have no other purpose, their lives are inconsequential to the character’s backstory or history.
This magical characterization is a direct link to American Christianity and how they demonized West African religions and practices, labeling them as satanic. American slaves, if they had any religious value to white congregations, were beings who needed “saving from the devil.” In that same breath, though, there was a palpable fear that Black people could utter curses or tap into otherworldly powers if white masters weren’t careful. This dichotomy is a key reason you see so many mentalist or occult positions in movies with Black characters right alongside The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and Green Mile.
Now, to be clear, Black characters being in the periphery or even having powers isn’t inherently wrong. However, when those are the only roles being offered or when high-profile projects only provide these types of roles, it can link back into the systemic issues with this trope. So, if you’re worried that a character may be falling into this trope, ask yourself a few questions:
- Does this character have any meaningful connections to the main character?
- Do any of the other cast members, aside from the protagonist, interact with this character?
- How were they introduced into the film? Did they just show up randomly, or did they have a reasonable connection to the character?
- Are they exhibiting any unusual powers that the film glosses over and doesn’t explain?
SOSWAG
*spoilers for American Society ahead*
When the credits are nearly ready to role, we get a glimpse of Lizzie heading into a salon and opening a secret passage that mirrors how Aren joined the American Society by entering a barbershop. We soon discover that Lizzie has been in her own society the whole time, the Society of Supportive Wives and Girlfriends. Libii has said that his intent with this inclusion was to make people think about the unseen characters who are routinely ignored or only there to prop up the protagonist.
And this would be fine…except for agency and autonomy.
We can no longer trust if Lizzie actually likes Aren, and you can bet if there were a sequel, that’s going to be the first fight they have as a couple. Did Lizzie sit in the coffee shop and set up Aren to like her? Is he just her assignment of the week? the month? How does this work long term? Does Lizzie have any choice in who she works with? Can she leave this role at any point?
Credit: Focus Features
Also, it’s hard not to emphasize with Aren’s plight and issues even more as a result. The insinuation before he joins the society is that he’s rather cowardly and meek, but taking that temperament, putting him into a love triangle between Lizzie and Jason where he can’t express his feelings or risk disrupting the society and triggering racial strife…while he’s also being squeezed or egged on by another society is incredibly sick. To be clear, Lizzie isn’t portrayed as antagonistic, but given the context of Aren’s responsibility and what we must now assume about Lizzie’s role, it’s hard to see how her actions are actually helping. To make matters worse, the script plays too loose with Lizzie and Jason’s relationship, at one point I swore they were already together but later they insinuate that they were only close and hadn’t cemented their relationship yet. Asking Aren to navigate those muddy waters on top of his society role is just cruel yet usual romcom punishment it seems.
It’s one of those twists that only gets worse the more you think about it, especially if you flip the genders for a second…I’ll let you think about that. I’m all for developing better characters and having their contributions and overall arc over the course of a film matter more. But there had to be a better way to develop this idea instead of robbing both characters of their agency.
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