Toronto Report: 'Barry' Is the Second Great Movie About Barack Obama
At first, it seemed as though director Vikram Gandhi’s Barry had arrived at the Toronto Film Festival at a disadvantage. Just weeks earlier, the strongly received Sundance Film Festival sensation Southside With You — aka the Obama first-date movie — opened in theaters and has since done solid business at the specialty box office. Barry, set in the early ’80s, when future president Barack Obama was a college kid in New York City, had come to Canada as a potential also-ran.
It turns out, however, that a double dose of young Obama is not a bad thing. The two movies function nicely as companion pieces, with Barry being a spiritual prequel of sorts to Southside With You. And — not to take anything away from the charming Southside — Barry is even better. It’s a soulful, bittersweet and funny coming-of-age story that more effectively captures the essence and ambition of the future president through the lens of his struggles with racial identity and his awakening to social inequality.
The film starts off in 1981 with 20-year-old Barack (newcomer Devon Terrell) — or Barry, as he’s then called — puffing on a cigarette aboard an airliner as it descends into New York. He takes up residence in a rough-and-tumble uptown Manhattan neighborhood near Columbia University, where he has transferred from California’s Occidental College to major in political science.
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We see him experience racial profiling at the hands of a Columbia security guard, engage in verbal sparring with a white classmate who bemoans that debates about race “always have to be about slavery,” and flex some serious skills on the basketball court. (Gandhi admitted to me after the screening on Sunday that he took some creative license there.)
Like Southside, there’s also a stirring romance at the film’s heart. Barry falls for Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy), who Gandhi revealed was an amalgam of three white women Obama dated during his college years. Even as a composite character, she grounds the film’s most convincing and poignant arc. Charlotte is a kind and gentle soul, but Barry feels uneasy about her upscale Connecticut background, and it’s no spoiler to say their bond is not meant to be.
While Southside painted Barack as a young man with clear daddy issues, Barry takes a more nuanced look at Obama’s feelings toward his absent father, who was killed in a car accident in 1982. In one of the film’s liveliest sequences, we also meet Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, a sharp-minded free spirit warmly portrayed by Ashley Judd, who will have audiences wishing they’d gotten to know the real woman. (Dunham died in 1995.)
Barry’s struggles are real, but none are as pervasive as the identity crisis he confesses to his mother: As someone of mixed race, he doesn’t feel like he fits in with either the black or white community. The film’s subtle, engaging handling of Obama’s inner conflict may be its crowning achievement. It’s not surprising considering Barry was written by Adam Mansbach, author of the eye-opening underground novel Angry Black White Boy (though better known for the comedic “children’s book for adults,” Go the F–k to Sleep).
The performances are stellar throughout, starting with the quietly powerful work of Terrell, who people may be shocked to discover is Australian, as many in the audience were at the postscreening Q&A. Also terrific is Taylor-Joy, who finally gets to play a “real girl” after otherworldly turns in The Witch and Morgan and brings an Emma Stone-esque charm to the role. The impressive ensemble is rounded out by Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton), Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood), and hilarious newcomer Avi Nash.
Barry also announces Gandhi — who made his directorial debut in 2012 with the provocative but criminally under-seen faux documentary Kumaré — as a major filmmaking force. Beautifully captured by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, Barry has a fluid and stylish retro vibe to it, driven home by an infectious early ’80s soundtrack. With Barry, Gandhi & Co. take us back to the old school, and it’s a trip you’re going to want to book.
Post Updated Sept. 13
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