Overheard at Table 3: You People (2023)

Let me start by saying that Eddie Murphy and Julia Louise Dreyfus are fantastic in this movie.  They truly blend into their roles, Murphy so much so that you can actually forget that he is Eddie Murphy.  He really comes across as a Farrakhan sycophant, and Dreyfus is fantastic as the overbearing Jewish mother - she makes a stereotypical role believable: the role of an overbearing Jewish mother IS such a stereotype that it's hard to play it straight, but somehow she manages such conviction that it's funny without being slapstick-funny.

Those two are so good in their roles that they make everybody else seem like community theater newbies, including Jonah Hill, who seems to be playing his role as a dimwit slacker with no redeeming qualities.  So if he is somehow supposed to be representative of a "modern Jew" then he is outshone by by Lauren London's character, who, while not conforming to her father's religion, at least seems to play a more authentic familial relationship.

The main weakness of this movie is how it descends into a pissing contest of which segment of America has the larger share of historical trauma.  Hell, there's even a dinner scene where they discuss just that "You actually comparing the Holocaust with 400 years of slavery?" noted mainly for its praise of Farrakhan and the shaming of a familial tradition of podiatry.

But, at the most part, it simply wasn't funny (although it's supposed to be) and when Hill's character openly starts lying to his fiancée about minor things, and how he supposedly runs a podcast about Black culture and clearly knows nothing about Black culture, the viewer (well, I suppose any non-Black viewer) would really start to wonder what really is the point of this film.  But then, all the while, we know what the point is: anything that doesn't follow the contemporary narrative of sectarian victimhood has no place in modern social conversation.  And we are all now in our own little foxholes, defending how my ancestral trauma is greater than your ancestral trauma.