Mixed Race Studies

‘Barry’ or How Barack Obama Learned to Stop Worrying and Love His Blackness

The Daily Beast
2016-12-20

Marlow Stern, Senior Entertainment Editor

Netflix

The new Netflix film ‘Barry’ explores young Obama’s days at Columbia University, torn between the world of his rich white girlfriend and the African-American community.

There’s a scene in Dreams From My Father, the memoir of Barack Obama, that illuminates how the future president struggled to feel at home in white America. Obama, 22, has paid a visit to the family estate of his white girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, 25. It’s a beautiful autumn day in Norfolk, Connecticut, and, after traipsing about the foliage-strewn woods, he finds himself in the family library. There, he observes an assemblage of photographs depicting his lover’s grandfather, a wealthy man of great import, posing with presidents, foreign dignitaries, and titans of industry.

“Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany,” wrote Obama. “And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

That push-pull between these two sides of Obama, white and black, is explored in the new film Barry, now streaming on Netflix. Directed by Vikram Gandhi, it dramatizes the years Obama (played by Devon Terrell) spent at Columbia University in 1981 New York City…

Read the entire review here.

How ‘Barry’ Gets Obama Right—And Wrong

Newsweek
2016-12-21

Matthew Cooper, Political Editor

President Barack Obama during a White House news conference in Washington, December 16. A new Netflix production, “Barry,” charts his college years in New York, when “Barry,” as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity. JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

There’s less than a month left of Barack Obama’s presidency, but the 55-year-old remains enigmatic. His remarkable ascent—as the son of a mixed-race marriage, the child of a single mother in Hawaii—to the Oval Office is as great a Log Cabin tale as that of any of his 43 predecessors. Maybe it’s because of his swift rise or his outlier/insider duality that he remains, even in his last days in office, the object of so much dispute.

The president has already penned two deservedly acclaimed memoirs and more are planned. And he’s been the subject of two biopics, this summer’s charming Southside with You, about his first date with Michelle (nee Robinson), and now Barry, a Netflix production that charts his college years in New York, when “Barry,” as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity…

Read the entire article here.

‘Barry’ director on race, identity and why the young Obama matters

Mashtable
2016-12-20

Proma Khosla

Vikram Gandhi didn’t direct the Netflix biopic Barry because he cared about Barack Obama. He made it because he cared about a kid named Barry.

Gandhi set out to discover who Barack was before he was Barack, back in 1981. The film follows a portion of Obama’s life then as a student at Columbia University, and how it shaped who he would grow up to be.

“I don’t know who Barack Obama is,” Gandhi told Mashable in a phone interview. “I didn’t study that. I studied who Barry was. I related with Barry. The things that he’s struggling with are things that people around me have struggled with, I’ve struggled with, and I think that I still struggle with. Barack Obama’s the president; I have no idea what that’s like, but I know what it’s like to be a confused kid, a 20-year-old kid in New York City trying to figure out where you belong.”

The 1981 iteration of Barack Obama held particular resonance for Gandhi, who studied at Columbia some 17 years later. He remembered the classes, the bars, the diners — he even lived next door to the building that once housed a future president. The film is an intersection of two identity crises: What it means to grow up and what it means to be mixed race in America…

Read the entire article here.

Watch The Trailer For Barry, Netflix’s Barack Obama Biopic

TIME
2016-11-22

Nash Jenkins

There are just under two months until Donald Trump is inaugurated, but a sentimental nostalgia for Barack Obama’s presidency has been building for quite some time. The new trailer for Barry, a biographical film about Obama’s days as a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, might help stoke it.

Newcomer Devon Terrell will play the 44th President as a 20-year-old undergraduate, grappling with his identity as a mixed-race kid from Honolulu in a largely white scene. “You a whole different type of brother,” a peer tells him at one point. “You do realize that, don’t you?”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Barry’ Is An Introspection On President Obama’s Collegiate Years

Black Girl Nerds
2016-11-06

Jamie Broadnax

An Uneventful Origin Story Of Our First Black President

The most profound experiences of our lives happen during those tumultuous years before we have achieved our own level of success.  The moment before we meet the love of our life, start a family, or become an entrepreneur.  In the film Barry, directed by Vikram Ghandhi, we dive into the origin story of our first Black President Barack Obama.  The story examines the college years of Barry and his experiences during his years as an academic at Columbia University.

Earlier this year, the film Southside With You gave us some background about the budding romance between Barack and Michelle Obama.  It was a dramatic depiction about one of our favorite relationships in pop culture.  The film Barry, which is more serious in tone; and focused more on Barack Obama’s self-analyzing and contemplation of his experiences, doesn’t quite have the impact that one would expect from a strong biopic…

Read the entire review here.

Toronto Film Review: ‘Barry’

Variety
2016-09-10

Owen Gleiberman, Chief Film Critic

Devon Terrell in Barry. Courtesy of TIFF

Set in 1981, a canny and absorbing drama paints a highly convincing portrait of Barack Obama when he was a 20-year-old college student in New York, still piecing together who he was.

In the movie world, there is often a fine line between coincidence and karma. It’s not really all that hard to fathom how two filmmakers, within a year of each other, could each come up with the notion of making a kind of snapshot biopic about the young Barack Obama. Yet the fact that both movies are emerging near the tail-end of the Obama presidency is surely no accident. The time has come to take stock, and Obama, at the twilight of his leadership, with eight years of policy and scrutiny, controversy and (yes) celebrity behind him, is ripe for the kind of mythological intimacy that the movies, perhaps uniquely, can provide.

“Southside With You,” the Sundance hit that was released into theaters just two weeks ago, is a deft and observant talkathon that turns Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date into a touching political spin on “Before Sunrise.” The Barack of that movie, which is set on a single day in 1989, is still finding his way, but he’s already a precocious young version of the Obama we know: impeccable and confident, a fusion of insight and arrogance and clarity and empathy, speaking in those rolling information-age cadences.

The Barack Obama we meet in “Barry,” on the other hand (a movie set eight years earlier), is a very different sort of cat, a young man you feel you scarcely know at all, because he doesn’t totally know himself — which turns out to be the theme of the movie. As played by the canny Australian actor Devon Terrell, he’s not even Barack yet, he’s just Barry, rolling with the punches, a slightly gawky handsome angular dude with a fringe of Afro and a way of falling into pensive trances when he’s chain-smoking. Terrell nails the clipped vibe of awareness, and a youthful version of the stare, to an uncanny degree. His Barry is reasonably self-possessed, with a lot of ideas, but he doesn’t have a clue as to how they fit together. He’s not the talkative lawyer-professor we’re used to. He’s tentative, his brashness weighed down by hidden doubts…

Read the entire review here.