The Lovebirds (2020)

The Lovebirds arrives as a studio romantic comedy that sold its theatrical birthright to Netflix during the pandemic. It stars Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani as a couple whose breakup is interrupted by a murder, a blackmail conspiracy, and a great deal of running. The film is pleasant, forgettable, and mostly interested in jokes. That is not a criticism. It is a classification.

The casting is the most notable progressive gesture. A Black woman and a South Asian man anchor a mainstream rom-com, and the film never makes a grand statement about it. Leilani is capable and drives much of the plot, but the movie does not organize itself around a feminist argument. She invokes racial profiling as a reason not to trust the police, a real and specific beat. Race remains a detail of the characters' lives, not the film's subject. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental sermon, no body-positivity thread, no neurodivergent representation, and no revisionist history. The blackmail plot involves wealthy people in masks, which might look like an invitation to eat the rich. The film declines. It is more interested in the orgy joke.

The social commentary stays brief. A line about profiling lands, then the movie returns to car chases and bickering. There is no lecture, no sermon, no attempt to educate the audience on the correct position regarding late capitalism or the climate. The Lovebirds is a comedy of manners with a body count. It wants to be liked. It succeeds often enough. For those of us who catalogue cultural signals for a living, the experience is akin to tasting a vintage and finding almost no tannins. The wine is fine. The cellar remains unthreatened.