Where does acting end and reality begin? In a movie now in rotation on HBO, actress Allison Williams, the daughter of MSNBC anchor Brian Williams, declares: “My dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Like, the love is so real.”
Sounds perfectly plausible that such sentiment would apply to her real life father, the disgraced ousted anchor of the NBC Nightly News.
I stumbled upon the line in Get Out (trailer), a horror movie from Universal released in February. In the scene, Williams and her boyfriend discuss their impending trip to visit her parents. Given that he’s black, “Chris Washington,” played by Daniel Kaluuya, seeks assurance he won’t “be chased off the lawn with a shot gun.”
The Williams character, “Rose Armitage,” then makes the promise about her father’s allegiance to Obama. So, her parents “are not racist.”
The movie, written and directed by Jordan Peele from Comedy Central’s Key and Peele, has a clear racial agenda in which a white family does very bad things to black people. IMDb’s plot tease: “It’s time for a young African American to meet with his white girlfriend’s parents for a weekend in their secluded estate in the woods, but before long, the friendly and polite ambience will give way to a nightmare.”
Bradley Whitford and Cathleen Keener play the parents (who, without giving away the plot, definitely don’t come across as people with whom anyone black would want to be friends).
Earlier: “Daughter of Brian Williams on Politics: ‘Who Do I Charm or Bully?’”
