Southside with You: A Future President Finds Love

Southside with You is a low-key little movie about a first date that doesn’t exactly start out as a date.  I’ve seen it compared to Before Sunrise, the 1995 Richard Linklater flick in which characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a European train and—through a night of walking and talking in a foreign city—discover one another’s souls. But there are some big differences too. At the end of  Before Sunrise the lovers part, only to reunite decades later for two sequels. At the end of Southside with You, two colleagues at a Chicago law firm seem well on the road to getting married, and one of them will end up becoming the 44th president of the United States.

Yes, Southside with You chronicles the first purely social encounter of Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama. (He, a Harvard law student, is a summer intern at a big-name law firm, and she, officially his supervisor, is determined to keep their relationship all business.) Though their verbal give-and-take is the screenwriter’s invention, many of the details of their all-day outing, which includes a visit to an exhibit of African-American art and a screening of Spike Lee’s new and controversial Do The Right Thing, are apparently true. And some of the deep emotions they gradually reveal—involving her feelings about her career and his complex attitude toward his parents—can be found in news reports and in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. Midway through the film there’s a key scene in which they attend a meeting called by everyday black folks desperate to build a community center. It’s important to this movie in showing Michelle (as well as the audience) the uncanny abilities of  this persistent young man who’s so determined to woo her, however frosty she may intend to be. Still, the film is most interesting when it’s just the two of them, bantering, bickering, airing their dreams.

What fascinates me is the fact that this is a love story featuring a sitting president. There’ve been lots of movies about U.S. chiefs of state, but most of them have been long out of office when they appear on the screen. Probably the president most often depicted in Hollywood movies is Abraham Lincoln, who’s featured in everything from the original Birth of a Nation to Spielberg’s masterful Lincoln. Most films in which he appears focus on the Civil War, but John Ford’s 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln tells the story of a young man (played by Henry Fonda) discovering his talent for law and finally deciding to run for political office. Lincoln’s future wife Mary Todd is a character in the Ford film, but so is Lincoln’s legendary lost love, Ann Rutledge.    

The union of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, seemingly a mismatched duo, is one that has long intrigued many Americans. But the TV miniseries dealing with their courtship and marriage, Eleanor and Franklin, did not appear until 1976, long after both were dead. I’m not sure I’d want to see the re-enacted wooing of George and Barbara Bush (dull?), nor that of John and Jacqueline Kennedy (disturbing?) on screen. My colleague Will Swift, distinguished president of the Biographers International Organization, has published Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage. Though most screen depictions of Nixon make him into a villain or a buffoon, Will’s book has persuaded me that the awkward Dick’s courting of glamorous Pat might lend itself to an interesting film. But a portrait of the Clintons (or the Trumps) finding love—that’s a bit too colorful for me.

Thoughts on Inauguration Day

The first presidential inauguration I remember was that of John F. Kennedy. My 9th grade journalism teacher lugged a small TV set into the classroom, and we were all mesmerized by the flickering black-and-white image of a handsome young man in formal dress taking the oath of office. Yes, I distinctly recall him uttering the famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Uh oh, I thought. What exactly does that mean for me?

Television made me, along with my fourteen-year-old classmates, a participant in those inaugural ceremonies. (Less than three years later, it also made me a participant in Kennedy’s funeral.) Today, of course, we all expect that our big-screen TVs, not to mention our computers and even our smartphones, will allow us to witness history, up close and personal. An inauguration like that of President Barack Obama is, perhaps first and foremost, a major media event.

And in some ways it’s also a Hollywood event. The main stars of the day are politicians, but Hollywood stars also help raise the pizazz level. In the lead-up to yesterday’s ceremony, Eva Longoria was the host of an inaugural concert at which Rita Moreno, Jose Feliciano, and other Latino celebrities performed. The inauguration itself featured patriotic songs sung in respectful but contemporary stylings by James Taylor (the Sixties singer who was also featured in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop), Kelly Clarkson (who shot to fame as the first winner of American Idol, then went Hollywood in the vapid From Justin to Kelly ), and Beyoncé (the drop-dead-gorgeous chanteuse who acquitted herself nicely in Dreamgirls). I also caught a glimpse of an inaugural ball at which the First Couple was serenaded by Jennifer Hudson. Hudson, of course, quickly moved from American Idol finalist to Oscar winner for her Dreamgirls supporting role.

But in watching the inauguration I was struck by one other TV memory that shows how times have changed. During the Sixties, the three big television networks loved to rack up audiences by hosting special events. In the turbulent year 1967, singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte was the sole guest on a major TV special starring a popular British singer, a petite blue-eyed blonde named Petula Clark. The two taped a poignant anti-war duet, in the course of which she spontaneously touched his arm. A representative of the sponsoring car company, Plymouth, was present during the taping. When he saw the touch, he became apoplectic. Says the show’s director/producer Steve Binder, “You’d have thought they had fornicated on the air.” Binder rallied support from the host network, NBC, then forced the show’s editor to erase the earlier takes of the song, so the offending moment would have to be aired. The special was broadcast in April 1968, stirring up huge media attention. With good reason, Binder insists, because it was “the first time a black and a white had touched on primetime television.” Screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan recollected for me the controversy the special generated: “Everyone went crazy over that . . . . Unbelievable! They wouldn’t show it in the South.”

That was then; this is now. Politicians love to press the flesh, and this year’s inauguration was no exception. On the steps of the Capitol, in Statuary Hall, and on the reviewing stand, our first African-American president and his wife were comfortably hugging men and women of all races. I’m not aware of any sponsors, or network execs, having heart attacks. It’s nice to think that TV can now truly broadcast in living color.