The American Society Of Magical Negroes review: A movie that's afraid of itself

Although The Matrix came out two years before Spike Lee famously coined the term “magical, mystical Negro” in 2001, it successfully inverted the potential fulfillment of that trope. Morpheus was undoubtedly a self-sacrificing guide to Neo. but it was Morpheus’ confidence, the weight of respect his character’s presence inspired throughout the film’s world. Kobi Libii’s debut feature, The American Society Of Magical Negroes, attempts a different approach to subverting the trope, by conceptually centering his film around a whole secret society dedicated to using magic exclusively to help white people.

The title, at first glance, evokes the image of an anachronistic period piece, featuring Black wizards and witches on a mission to save the world. But we live in a post-Get Out world and, now, a post-American Fiction world, where genre films by talented Black artists are given Academy Awards when those films are also smart commentaries on modern hypocrisies of race in America. Libii’s film is instead part anachronistic fantasy, part sketch-worthy satire, part romantic comedy, and part purgation of Libii’s own frustrations with race. Unfortunately, a fatal lack of consequence for the film’s world or characters prevents it from ever deepening its initial premise, or unifying the sum of its disparate parts.

The American Society Of Magical Negroes is the story of Aren, played by Justice Smith, who gives the character a similar timidity that he also gave the severely underconfident Simon the Sorcerer in last year’s surprisingly fun and heartfelt Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Aren is a broke visual artist whose backbone has a comparable strength to the brightly colorful yarn sculptures with which he hopes to make his artistic mark. The film opens with him side-stepping, tip-toeing, and apologizing his way through a gallery crowded with wealthy potential sponsors.

The unconscious automation of Aren’s behavior, a young Black man naturally elevating the comfort of the surrounding white people over his own, attracts the attention of Magical Negro Roger (David Alan Grier, on a kind of charming autopilot). Roger takes Aren under his wing, inducts him into the titular society, and sends him undercover to monitor his first client, Jason (a believably insecure Drew Tarver), an upstart white male web designer who works at a tech company called Meetbox. Aren soon discovers that Lizzie (an underutilized An-Li Bogan), the charming girl he had a meet-cute moment with in a coffee shop, not only works at Meetbox, but is Jason’s “work wife.” When Aren inadvertently convinces Jason to pursue her romantically he has to decide whether it’s more important to manage white discomfort or give voice to his own.

In the world of Magical Negroes, white discomfort is the metric by which everything else is measured. Roger insists that the society’s entire raison d’être is the monitoring of white discomfort, visualized by little floating barometers that gauge “white tears.” If that meter falls too deep into the red the Magical Negroes are sent on missions to utilize teleportation and conjuring spells, shifting the world around discomfited white clients until they’re comfortable again, thus saving the world one pacified white police officer at a time.

Joining the society starts to give Aren the language to describe the all-consuming self-doubt and hyper-awareness he’s always felt. In one of the film’s more successful scenes, Aren is challenged by Roger to unapologetically approach a crowd waiting to enter a club. When he finally takes the leap his immediate surroundings fade to black and we go close on Aren as he hyper-focuses on the immediate reactions of fear and uncertainty on the white patrons’ faces. He did nothing to warrant those reactions beyond being Black and slightly self-assured. It’s the closest we get to a feeling of resonance and consequence in a satire that is too cautious for its own good.

Aren is a shockingly incurious protagonist. Besides Roger, Aren never has any meaningful conversations with the various members of the society, and never tries to. The members all flit about in the background of classrooms and hallways tinged with mystically warm light, littered with wand boxes, thick, leather-bound books, and magical smoke of a Hogwarts-lite aesthetic. What we do learn about the rules and function of the society itself is broken up into lightly humorous lectures in which the aforementioned magic smoke projects former members establishing the “fundamentals” of being a Magical Negro. These projected vignettes poke fun at the trope via characters who quote their wise grandmothers and use thinly veiled innuendoes alluding to the dysfunctional manhoods of their white male protagonists. The lecturer, played with dry humor and majesty by Aisha Hinds, never talks to, acknowledges, or even notices Aren at all. Same goes for the classroom of Aren’s fellow novitiates. It’s disappointing that, outside of Roger and dramatic society president Dede (Nicole Byer), the film’s roster of talented Black actors rarely have the chance to meaningfully impact the story itself.

The majority of the film actually takes place in the sterile Silicon Beach-set Meetbox campus, where Aren fluffs up Jason’s ego and gradually bonds with Lizzie over their mutual attraction, as well as their shared frustration at having to prove themselves to white gatekeepers. The main tension of these scenes is that Aren is instructed by the League to give up his romantic pursuit of Lizzie as soon as Jason is interested in her, even as Aren and Lizzie become more attracted to each other. There’s genuine chemistry between Smith and Bogan that makes their scenes fun to watch, but the potential drama of the love triangle is completely undercut by the fact that it’s never believable for a second that Lizzie would consider Jason as a romantic prospect. One-sided conversations where Aren unsuccessfully tries to make Jason aware that his whiteness affords him the luxuries of confidence and assumed success muddles the focus of the Meetbox scenes even further, critiquing corporate culture on a level that is articulated but never felt.

Part of the problem is that the film never deepens beyond its initial assumption that white discomfort is what fostered the presence of Magical Negroes, both historically and within the mythology of the film itself. It’s not just white discomfort but racism that engenders the deep feelings of existential fear and diminishing self-esteem in Black people. When I suspect I’m making white people uncomfortable I fear for my life and my livelihood. I fear for my ability to survive because those moments make me distinctly aware of a social and economic system that benefits from the exploitation and control of its Black citizens. For all Roger’s talk about how their work is saving Black people, we’re never shown an example of how unsafe their world could be without them. No character is ever truly endangered, or made to confront the consequences of racism. And in a media landscape where as far back as The Boondocks and as recently as Atlanta and Sorry To Bother You, Black creators have found ways to hilariously satirize American racism without shying away from the potentially harsh and fatal consequences, the relative shallowness of this film just isn’t enough.

As Morpheus says in The Matrix, “There’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.” The American Society Of Magical Negroes is a film with a lot on its mind, but the execution as a work of cinematic drama feels disjointed and unchallenged. It’s ironic, and unfortunate, that a film presumably about the significance of discomfort feels so afraid to mine the depths of its own idea, or make anyone watching feel truly uncomfortable.