For a “lighthearted” comedy about a couple forced to rethink their breakup when they find themselves in the midst of a cultish crime, Michael Showalter’s latest, The Lovebirds, addresses (albeit in a less gruesome way) the entire reason behind why the Black Lives Matter movement has been raging on for the past six years: an inherent and warranted phobia of the police, those allegedly in existence “to protect and to serve” (granted, this is only officially the mantra of the LAPD, not of other cities’ departments). Re-teaming with Kumail Nanjiani after directing his script for The Big Sick (starring Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan) in 2017, Showalter has re-created the magic slightly more effectively than David Koepp with Kevin Bacon in You Should Have Left. And, within ten minutes of the ninetyish minute movie, our leads, Jibran and Leilani (Issa Rae, returning to New Orleans once again after The Photograph), are fearing for their lives as the car they’re driving is hijacked by an undercover police officer claiming to be in pursuit of a criminal named Tom (Nicholas X. Parsons). This after Jibran accidentally hit him while he was riding by on his bike (hence his nickname, “Bicycle”).
It quickly becomes evident, as “Mustache” (Paul Sparks) proceeds to run over Tom back and forth repeatedly, that even if he is a cop, he’s clearly a dirty one (ain’t they all?), and some major fuckery is afoot. With the car parked in an alley, Mustache gets out to search the body for something that’s ostensibly no longer there. A siren in the background sends Mustache running just as a majorly white bread hipster couple approaches the scene. Immediately freaked out, they get even more scandalized when Jibran and Leilani step out of the car in a dazed horror, with the hipster twats suddenly putting all the pieces together like, Oh yeah, who else would be responsible for such an atrocity? As they try to explain that the corpse in front of them is not their fault, the couple becomes increasingly upset, with the “Karen” of the operation picking up her phone to call the cops. “What are you doing?” Leilani demands after trying to explain the mechanics of what happened. “Karen” asserts, “I’m calling 911.” Leilani begs, “Please don’t do that. We would never hurt anyone.” “Karen” is immune to her plea as she spouts, “I’d like to report a murder or whatever.” Leilani continues to shout, “We didn’t murder anybody!” with “Karen” shrugging, “Yeah, stop.” “You stop!” Leilani shouts back. It’s then that the extent of what is happening fully dawns on her as she turns to Jibran to say, “Oh my God. The police aren’t gonna believe us.” Jibran is the one to set the precedent for bolting, with Leilani running after him to catch up. “Karen,” still wanting to be politically correct through her racism, then comments, “She just happens to be African American and he just happens to be a person of color as well. But I don’t, like, think they’re murderers because they’re minorities, I think they’re murderers because they literally just killed a guy.”
So it is that Jibran and Leilani are officially fugitives of the law, taking pause to review the situation at a twenty-four hour diner called Sunrise while Jibran muses of the milkshake excess phenomenon, “This silver milkshake container is such a thing, you know? They’re always like, ‘We made too much so here’s the extra and the container that we made it in.’ They can’t just measure it out. They don’t do that with other stuff. They’re not like, ‘Well here’s spaghetti and here’s some more spaghetti on the side. We made too much for the spaghetti plate. Here’s soup. We didn’t wanna measure it out early on and here we are.’ Like, what the fuck?” All in keeping with the Showalter brand of kook (see: Hello, My Name Is Doris) despite the script being written by Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall.
As Leilani gets Jibran back on track to focus on the dilemma at hand, she pretends to grill him as a police officer to prove her point that they can’t turn themselves in now that they’ve already fled from the scene of the crime. When Jibran sputters out an excuse, she pantomimes touching her chest to conceal something and then, in her police officer character, replies, “That’s me covering up my bodycam so I can beat your ass, you fucking liar.” Jibran gets the point and the two decide to follow through on a lead in Tom’s calendar with a woman named Edie (Anna Camp). With the appointment set at a bar, the two manage to find her after some amateur sleuthing methods–though their discovery of her turns out to be a lose rather than a win as she kidnaps them and takes them to a remote location where they’re tied up and threatened by her and her masked husband. Some of those threatening tactics include hovering a pan of bacon grease above them (a bit weird, but effective as far as intimidation tactics go). When they manage to escape with some effective teamwork that proves just how valuable it is to have been with someone for “so long” (in their case, four years) so as to be able to work together intuitively, their next venture in trying to expose the truth about Tom and Mustache is another botched failure, whereupon Mustache closes in at a frat house filled with minions who work for Tom on a major blackmailing scheme.
This, of course, is the part where a secret society becomes involved, filled with members from high political and corporate positions in fear for their livelihoods as Leilani and Jibran infiltrate the organization by showing up to what turns out to be some orgiastic ritual where everyone in the audience just watches with their Venetian-style masks on. On the verge of being picked apart by the faux Venetians for their fraudulence, an alarm goes off in the building and the police seize upon the space; thus, Leilani and Jibran are finally forced to come face to face with the long arm of the law, specifically Detective Mary Martin (Andrene Ward-Hammond), who, after letting them sit in nervous anticipation in the interrogation room while they also seem to reignite the former chemistry between them, waltzes in and starts with, “We’ve been looking for you all over the city. You guys are key witnesses to a homicide and the suspect is still on the loose. We’ve been trying to track you down all night to make sure you’re safe.”
In complete disbelief that they aren’t about to be waterboarded for a crime they didn’t commit, Leilani responds, “Wait, I’m sorry. You don’t think we’re the murderers?” Mary ripostes, “No, there were traffic cameras that caught the entire pursuit. We’re trying to ID the individual who carjacked your vehicle.” Still unable to fathom that they’re not being charged with anything, Jibran adds, “Just to be clear… we are not suspects in a murder/homicide?” as Leilani asks, “You know we didn’t do this?” Mary balks, “Of course you didn’t do it. Why would two civilians violently murder a man they’ve never even met?” Would that every officer of the law could be so logical. Via this incredulity that the detective and the police who work under her could automatically believe they weren’t guilty, The Lovebirds solidifies its comment on how much harm racial profiling causes to the psyche of the most ordinary of citizens, merely minding their own business before destiny calls upon them to serve as material witnesses. In need of the couple’s help because the footage obtained from the traffic cameras is too grainy (making Mustache look as arcane as Bigfoot) for the culprit to be recognized (similar to the way Bill Hader as Barry Berkman in Barry is spared), Mary orders them 24/7 security with a driver to take them back to their apartment. Their brief sense of relief, of course, fades when that driver turns out to be Mustache.
As the two are forced, once again, to overcome their previous ill feeling toward each other, they scheme in a manner that harkens back to Jibran’s milkshake rant when he also went off on the inanity of cigarette lighters in cars. Turns out, this rant will come back as a means to explain just how useful said apparatus still is in a vehicle, no matter how “updated” from the days of car stereos with tape players. Realizing that everything they thought made their relationship doomed to fail is actually what makes it work (in addition to lending it “spice”–an ultimate white people term for politely describing when anything has personality or flair–in this case, Leilani’s often voice-raising irritation with Jibran), the two agree to do something that originally set off a major argument at the beginning of the movie.
In a final moment of the caper, Leilani and Jibran run through a tunnel as sirens in the background briefly make us believe the police are in pursuit while Jibran screams, “Oh my God, they’re right there! We’re so fucked!” When they emerge from the tunnel, we see camera crews awaiting to get a shot of them as they participate in The Amazing Race in London (the aforementioned “something” Leilani wanted to do but Jibran said they couldn’t). So it is that The Lovebirds drives home the point that its entire premise is contingent upon the very real trope that people of color have been conditioned to live in constant fear and paranoia of the police–when they’ve done literally nothing wrong except be victims of chaotic circumstance just like the rest of us in this at sixes and sevens world.
