In an exit interview on Monday, President Obama and his longtime friend and former adviser David Axelrod discussed the lame duck’s peak popularity, his unbeatable chances had he run in 2016, and the early legs of his journey to greatness.
Axe asked about Obama’s late teenaged transformation from a fun-loving party guy to a self-consciously studious brooder, his decision to transfer from a Southern California party school to Columbia. Back then, the future leader of the free world was, in his own words, “in retrospect, wildly pretentious.” Catching up on Netflix could have triggered this confession: 2016’s second Obama biopic, Barry, depicts the president’s “pretentious” period, sans mature self-reflection.
The film, a Netflix exclusive from director Vikram Gandhi, came post-election; it was quietly released on the streaming service in mid-December. It’s less hopeful, and even less self-aware, than Southside with You, the saccharine feature-length treatment of the Obamas’ first date. Barry covers its subject’s first year as a transfer student, from his plane ride east to the news of his estranged father’s accidental death. If the film seems awkward and uneven, so was the eventual president’s uneasy individuation, we’re to understand. A chronic failure to feel that he fit in molded the tortured intellectual turned community organizer Barack from the raw clay of easy-going Barry.
The period Barry condenses is also when “Barry” ceases to be. He sloughs off the nickname that helped him fit in and becomes “Barack,” taking back his late father’s name. According to the film’s dramatization, the name-change follows from the news of Barack Sr.’s untimely death still. Barry is reading over a long-delayed letter he’s written his estranged father, and it’s revealed that, after months of soul-searching since his father’s last letter, he’d signed the response he’ll never send: “Barack.”
There’s no story here without the common-knowledge context that this starry-eyed young man, angsty as any anonymous undergrad, will be president of the United States. He’s more poet than politician, friends chide him, and the viewer at home chuckles knowingly. “[His] politics are cute,” says his girlfriend, Charlotte, who ends up too much like his midwestern mother—not least in that her progressive politics direct her lovelife.
In a political science discussion, Barry answers that the moral authority of a powerful and, hopefully, wise few necessarily overrides the will of an unenlightened majority. Here the viewer at home could nod knowingly or chill at the thought of an idealistic twenty-year-old’s eight years at the reins.
The real problem with the biopic, aside from its ceaseless winking allusions to the subject’s future, is its source material’s superiority. The months between Obama’s arrival on Columbia’s Harlem campus and his father’s faraway death in Nairobi are also central to Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from my Father.
In 2007, Andrew Ferguson wrote a WEEKLY STANDARD essay, “Literary Obama,” on the then-candidate’s two books, one remarkably insightful (Dreams from my Father) and the other focus-grouped (Audacity of Hope).
Dreams, Ferguson observed, offered an epiphany at every turn: “The story as he tells it is a bit overstuffed with epiphanies; one event after another sends waves of significance through the narrator’s vast reservoir of sensibility. And though he’s a graceful and sure-handed stylist, Obama has a weakness for the dying fall; many of his sentences are so grandly bittersweet, so summarily touching, you could imagine them as the last lines of a Tennessee Williams play.”
Barry couldn’t leave his apartment without a heady realization about racial politics’ playing out in his and his parents’ personal failings. The canny reader might assume some revisitional revelation-planting on the part of the memoirist.
If the young Obama’s epiphanies are guideposts in Dreams, in Barry we choose our own adventure. For the moody scene with the letter, he’s on a Connecticut golf course sitting in a sand trap—having left poor Charlotte alone at her sister’s wedding reception. He, chainsmoker throughout, butts a Marlboro in the sand. And then, solemnly reading over the letter, changes his name. The change draws a line between himself and oblivious limousine liberals like Charlotte’s parents, who’ve welcomed him while fearing he’ll find them phony radicals.
In the memoir the future president would go on to write, sympathetic context give thudding moments a greater meaning, beyond vague moral indictment worthy of an early-eighties Holden Caulfield.
The memoirist Obama made abundantly readable sense of his youthful trials, this “wildly pretentious” time. But his anxious coming-of-age, reckoning with his lineage and beginning to forgive his absent father, was not yet a hero’s anguish and not quite a means to political fame at the time Obama wrote Dreams.
Now, students of Obama’s growing slate of exit interviews know the soon-to-be-former president plans a redux, another memoir—but a guaranteed hit this time. Dreams was not a true success until its author was; by 2011, it was one of Time‘s hundred best non-fiction books. And in late 2016, he’s the most admired man in America, at least according to an end-of-year Gallup poll. Whatever he writes, a grateful, grieving readership will lap it up.
