I’m kind of tired of the bourgie-black-parents-have-to-deal-with-their-kid-dating-interracially thing.
A lot of the humor in Our Family Wedding (and Guess Who and Something New and hell, even that terrible MTV movie Love Song) seems to rest on the fact that the blacks! are! middle! class! With their cotillions and tennis and fancy cars!
Look, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is one of my favorite movies. It’s beautifully done. It was also made 43 years ago. Making that film into a comedy by ‘turning the tables’ and making the black family wealthy and biased is both annoying and unsubtle. I don’t really see what’s funny about a black dude with a nice car being mad that his son is marrying the Mexican daughter of a mechanic.* Yes, that kind of bias exists, no, it’s not inherently comical. In other words, and to ‘turn the tables’ myself, racial bias wouldn’t be inherently comical if the lead were, say, a middle class Harrison Ford instead of Forest Whitaker.
And Alyssa Rosenberg compares this film to Something New, wondering about the young couple getting married:
It’s much more interesting to me to see main characters dealing with race in their own love lives–and frankly, more honest–than to pretend everybody is colorblind these days and it’s just the Olds who object. In Something New, the main character certainly is pressured by everyone from her parents to her friends to date a black man instead of a white one, but her reaction is much more complicated than simply throwing off their objections. She has issues of her own. She’s not a saint. And therefore, she is interesting.
I liked Something New. As romantic comedies go, it’s about as subtle as they come (which, obv, isn’t saying much). But it was cute, and having Sanaa Lathan chew a little scenery as she agonized over her own feelings about freeing herself or buttoning up was a nice change of pace for an interracial dating film.
*Alas, I still sort of want to go see this movie to support America Ferrera, and Lance Gross, who I went to school with at HU.