Mary Burke @crackerjaw
Loved BARRY directed by @vikramkgandhi at #TIFF. Devon Terrell is an absolute superstar. I
Kevin Polowy @djkevlar
BARRY is a soulful, bittersweet, funny Obama coming-of-age tale. Loved it. And I can't believe Devon Terrell is Australian. #TIFF16
Evadne Macedo @EvadneMacedo
Impressed with #Barry: amazing casting, phenomenal acting, great script, real sense of place in setting #TIFF16
Rayne Roberts @raynemikele
#Barry is the Barack Obama coming of age film we didn't know we needed. A beautiful and gritty ode to @POTUS that keeps him real. Bravo
@jenyamato
So glad I caught the young-Barack-in-NYC pic BARRY, which would make for a (more nuanced) companion piece to SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU #tiff
@jenyamato
BARRY is emotionally *beep* up, soul-searching, chain-smoking, anti-politics, semi-woke, bball-playing young Barack in NYC circa 1981 #TIFF
Loved #Barry #TIFF16 a look at Obama in his hipster college era,a more assured piece of filmmaking than the other one (#Southside, not 2016)
Daniel Joyaux @Thirdmanmovies
#Barry --about Barack's first year in NYC in '81--feels a bit Obama fan fiction-y, but has elements that work, especially @anyataylorjoy
@theamynicholson
The Barack Obama biopic BARRY is outstanding. Best film yet of the fest, and the best film I've ever seen about race in America.
@tiniv
#TIFF Snap Review: #Barry makes my crush on Barack Obama grow stronger by the minute. A sweet take on his principles' origins.
Researched by writer Adam Mansbach through as many sources as he could find, but obviously not with the cooperation of the subject, Barry absorbingly recounts a bracing period of adjustment. The very bright young man is exposed to all manner of influences: His live-in landlord, the brashly sexual and enthusiastic druggie Saleem (an amusing Avi Nash) from Pakistan; his milquetoasty white roommate Will (Ellar Coltrane, from Boyhood); and street-and-booksmart basketball buddy PJ (an engaging Jason Mitchell).
Above all, there is a bold, bright and strikingly individualistic young lady named Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy, memorable from last year’s The Witch), who makes it her business to become Barry’s first New York girlfriend (at the Toronto q&a, it was said that this character is an amalgam of three white girlfriends Obama had during his first year at Columbia). Taylor-Joy gives her character a wonderfully offbeat bohemianism that would have made her right at home in Beat Generation days.
Barry lets all these new acquaintances into his life, especially Charlotte, who soon wants to take him home for Thanksgiving and more. But he’s still feeling his way, trying to read the signals from both black and white society, reading books like Invisible Man for the first time, watching the classic Brazilian film Black Orpheus and trying to be sufficiently “street” with local blacks on the basketball court and at a late-night party in the Harlem projects, where he’s brutally beaten for chatting with the wrong lady. “This ain’t my scene,” he now realizes.
Arcing over it all is the absence of his father in his life. In the opening scene, as he sits smoking on the plane heading for New York, Barry (who smokes all the time) tries to write a long-postponed letter to his father to try to ignite some sort of relationship with him, but he can never find within him the right words. And then it’s too late.
His mother (an effervescent Ashley Judd) turns up briefly, long enough to demonstrate that she’s so smart and overbearing that a little of her goes a long way; “He’s old enough to live his life,” she proclaims, then disappears. Charlotte’s old school New England parents are perhaps more accepting than one might expect, but they still can’t help but make an uncomfortable racial faux pas or two. And the campus cops’ distrust of Barry is exceeded only by the latter’s disgust with black religious and political separatists haranguing people on the street.
A bit more attention should probably have been given to Barry’s studies; as it is, we see him in class only once and it’s never discussed what he’s studying, how he’s reacting to it and what his tentative career ambitions might be. Never alluded to is the intense interest in politics he had developed during his two years at Occidental, both in the classroom and as the organizer of a trade boycott of South Africa.
Nonetheless, Barry emerges as an involving and credible portrait of a smart young man with a good deal of growing and learning yet to do. So different was Obama’s background to anyone else who has ever become president of the United States that, at moments during the film, it’s impossible not to marvel at how it actually came to pass. Only in the United States, some might say. But never before.
'Barry': Film Review | TIFF 2016
“Barry” isn’t necessarily a better movie than “Southside With You,” which was the perfect end-of-the-Obama-era valentine. Yet if anything, it’s even more of a high-wire act — and the director, Vikram Gandhi, is fully up to it. Set in 1981, when Obama was a 20-year-old college student who moved to New York to transfer to Columbia University, the film is rooted in the murky, drifting, sleep-late-and-get-stoned-do-whatever nature of college life that the movies almost never get right. This one does, and that’s one reason it feels bracingly authentic.
Barry, after moving into a cruddy apartment on 109th St. and Amsterdam in Morningside Heights, glides with deceptive ease between black and white worlds, smoothing the ride with dope and alcohol. He’s a pretty good pickup basketball player, and he strolls the streets of Harlem buying copies of W.E.B. Dubois or picking an argument with the radical Black Israelites. He also gets into a debate in his poli-sci class — about whether democratic governments have inherent moral authority (he thinks they do; the overprivileged white liberal students think they don’t). He goes to keggers with his classmates and “ghetto” parties in the projects.
[...]
For a while, Barry, with his alternating current of black and white identification, grooves on the best of both worlds. He’s like a tall and rangy spy, a guy who makes himself fit in wherever he goes but never feels entirely at home. Sometimes, that’s because of how he looks: At the party in the projects, he gets bashed in the face by a girl’s father who resents his posh college-boy aura. But the real problem is that Barry has such finely tuned radar that he can read all the prejudicial ways others are reading him. The racist cops who demand his ID at night on campus are one thing, but when he finds himself in more enlightened environments, he is too often, in other people’s minds, the symbolic “black guy,” and he hates it, because it depresses him. He reads Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which gives him his hoop-shooting nickname (“Invisible”), and that’s appropriate, because the real Barry is still undercover.
Yet he does make friends easily. One of them is played, with lived-in scruffiness, by Ellar Coltrane, looking a poetically perfect two years older than he did at the end of “Boyhood.” Another one, who Barry meets on the local basketball court (he turns out to be a fellow Columbia student), is played with his own rascally double consciousness by Jason Mitchell, who was so good as Easy-E in “Straight Outta Compton.” Barry also lands a girlfriend, Charlotte, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who proves to be a true find. She’s the star of “Morgan” and “The Witch,” but almost nothing in those genre films (or her TV work) prepares you for the vivid presence she has here. She’s sensual but sharp, with eyes that slice through whatever she’s looking at.
Toronto Film Review: ‘Barry’
Directed by Vikram Gandhi (a fellow Columbia grad of color), “Barry” is obviously a fair bit more serious-minded than the year’s other film about Young Obama, and — in sharp contrast with the twinkle-eyed, cartoonish “Southside With You” — it treats its title character like the real person that he is and always has been. Barack Obama is a mythical figure in his own time, but Barry is just a kid trying to figure things out. He has a *beep* apartment. He has a Pakistani roommate (the charismatic Avi Nash), who has a serious cocaine habit. He has a dad somewhere in Kenya, and a half-written letter to him in his wallet. And Terrell’s performance makes all of these things feel like the moving parts of someone who’s in the process of becoming his own person.
A newcomer and a natural (and an Australian!), Terrell almost singlehandedly elevates “Barry” from a cutesy time capsule into something a bit richer and more alive. While inevitably borrowing some of Obama’s mannerisms (a lot of low grumbles between thoughts, a lot of words that flick up an octave on their last syllable), the young actor sidesteps cheap imitation in favor of presentness — Terrell bears more than a passing resemblance to the man he’s playing, but the real testament to his performance is that he appears to look so much more like Obama as the film goes on and we get to know his character.
Gandhi’s subtle and astute direction helps to nudge that along, his camera seeing Koch-era New York through the same lens of probing intensity that defined Barry’s perspective. The compositions (as well as the characters who occupy them) are flashy at some times, and purely functional at others. When Barry visits the projects, Gandhi follows him through the oppressive corridors in a long-take Steadicam shot that palpably conveys the sense that the college boy is entering — but not integrating himself into — another world. When Barry goes to see “Black Orpheus” with his mom (Ashley Judd), Gandhi reverts to the most casual medium shots in the world.
If only the film’s script evinced the same degree of sensitivity. Written by Adam Mansbach (whose claim to fame is the gimmicky “children’s” book “Go the *beep* to Sleep,” and for whom this project is an ironically #woke change of pace), “Barry” may pose as sober and searching look at a future world leader, but that that doesn’t stop it from unfolding like a “Shakespeare in Love” for the greatest political story of the 21st Century. You know those photos of a college-age Obama smoking under a fedora? Charlotte takes those. You know how Obama campaigned on the premise of “Change you can believe in?” It was Charlotte who asked him, “Do you not believe in change?”
Of course, that the film is so cheesy wouldn’t be as much of an issue if it weren’t so didactic about it. It’s one thing to show how young Obama was caught between two races, but it’s another to linger on his first encounter with a trans woman until you can all but see the lightbulb going off above his head. It’s one thing to show how young Obama struggled to negotiate his blackness, and another to (repeatedly) stage an agonizingly on-the-nose sequence that starts with a street vendor selling him a copy of “The Souls of Black Folks,” and ends a few steps down the block when a group of militant black Christians call a passerby a “white bytch.”
‘Barry’ Review: The Best Obama Biopic Yet, But Not the Whole Story — Toronto Review
