The Help, starring, from left, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, and Viola Davis, is pretty much as problematic as you would expect, in all the ways that you would expect, but also in some ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, either, e.g., it has almost as many “poop” “jokes” as The Change-Up. I discuss its issues, and ours, in my review for MSN Movies.
*Sigh* I don’t know if it’s possible for a Hollywood product to deal with the Civil Rights Movement without being noxiously patronizing. Glenn, your review confirmed everything I worried this film would be from the trailer. Somebody needs to buy the film rights to John Lewis’ WALKING WITH THE WIND pronto, or at least give a copy to every high school student in America. This looks like a spiritual sequel to that one Whoopi Goldberg movie about the Montgomery Bus Boycott that was all about Sissy Spacek’s Journey Towards Enlightenment rather than about what, er, King and Abernathy et al did. But that’s Hollywood for ya, I guess. Also, maybe you can confirm since I didn’t see it, but the trailer makes it seem like one of those POWER OF ONE things where racism is basically one bad apple in a nice basket (Swastika-tattooed Afrikaaner & Bryce Dallas Howard) whose defeat= victory for the good guys! Hopefully it’s not that reductive, but I fear that’s more the norm.
I haven’t seen the picture (and lets face it, I probably won’t, because I’m not made of either money or time), but I am reminded by your review of James Baldwin’s essay Everybody’s Protest Novel. While applying to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son in particular (Baldwin also addressed films fully in The Devil Finds Work, but I don’t have that on hand, but your review reminded me of the way in which Baldwin picks out moments of truth created by the black performers in Hollywood films, that was deeper than anything on screen):
The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.
It is rather easy to beat Hollywood over the head with its own good intentions, and I think that a critique needs to be a little more subtle that what Eddie Carmel is arguing in his phrase “noxiously patronizing,” which is true to an extent, but does not really represent the inherent problem of Hollywoods treatment of race relations. Despite more than a hundred years of history, I would argue that the classical system for all the great films that it created, remained, with exceptions in the thrall of D.W. Griffith (1), never quite outgrowing the melodramatic narratives he put forth in his films (eliding for a minute the glaring racism of his films), despite (or perhaps because of) the mediums advanced technology, its maturation has been seen have come about through the expansion of a narrative form tied to sentimental melodrama. The need to tug at our heartstrings is one that causes these films to fail so miserably in providing any illumination or genuine impact, and at the end of the day what is the point of a film like The Help? What is it adding to the discourse? Or is it even trying to?
(1) On a tangential note; it might be worth looking at Spielberg as the most pertinent example of a disciple of Griffith, since he is the most talented, and perhaps because of that the most problematic.
Also this turned out way longer than I wanted it too, hopefully somebody will be able to be a bit more lucid.
Peter, I agree with pretty much all you say here (especially the comparison of D.W. Griffith with Spielberg) but just wanted to offer a short explanation of what I meant with that perhaps-too-rash phrase. There have been excellent films made about race relations in America, about racism, discrimination, segregation, etc…I really wish Paul Greengrass’ last-days-of-MLK Jr. film MEMPHIS had come to fruition, for example of a thwarted effort that would have had interesting results. But it’s been the rejection/incomprehension of the stakes and importance of the (broadly defined, I know) Civil Rights Movement by American films that I feel is an especially dire indicator of what the country has learned from those years.
I’ll take the one on the left. Booyah! YEP YEP.
I hope the Stoner and Bryce have a montage where they try on little outfits. Why is every white woman in this a redhead?
Eddie, thanks for your thoughtful response. I agree that Hollywood has by and large failed to elaborate the stakes of the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately the question falls to how can, within the classical rubric, those stakes be expressed. It is I think a mistake to criticize a film on what it doesn’t do (although, I do it all the time). Instead, we need to formulate positively about how the stakes can be expressed, without being reductive. These films need to move past a bildungsroman, and instead foster a dialectic approach, centered on action.
It kills me that Viola Davis’ best years are being lost to these terrible The Black Lady roles. She was so, so good in SOLARIS, I desperately want her to get more real characters to play!
Meanwhile in further exercises in New Republic film criticsm, John McWhorter defends THE HELP for being precisely the kind of movie that film critics are unenthusiastic about: http://www.tnr.com/article/film/93779/the-help-black-racism
Haven’t seen THE HELP yet, but, as always with such films, one gets a sense of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ when reading reactions to it. I had a little first-hand experience with a related issue when I was a researcher for three seasons of an animated series called “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego,” which mixed crime-solving adventure with facts about various places and cultures around the globe. One episode was partially set among a Native American society, and we planned to include lots of historical and cultural facts about their people. When one of our team called a Native American organization for fact-checking and info gathering, she was rudely told that TV shows never get this stuff right and it would be best if we just dropped the episode. While the spokesperson was undoubtedly correct in assuming that 20-odd minutes of a Saturday morning cartoon would be unlikely to capture even a fraction of ANY race’s culture in a meaningful way, I didn’t (and don’t) get the mindset that finds complete avoidance to be preferable to an honest attempt at enlightening children (in however small a way) about a culture that may be unfamiliar to them. I do get the frustration with media’s often inept or incomplete attempts to be ‘inclusive,’ but surely it’s better to try to be part of the solution rather than the problem. We proceeded with the episode, found other, more helpful experts, and as far as I know received no complaints about the story.
Oh Partisan.
McWhorter: “How could it be that this film, hardly The Sorrow and the Pity but honest and thoroughly affecting, is being treated like a remake of Imitation of Life?”
A remake of…
No, you know what, fuck it. I’m not bothering this time.
Wow. That McWhorter article almost made me physically ill. I would advise people to “read the whole thing” so you can get to the ending and McWhorter’s supposed big finish, but I wish I hadn’t read it and I don’t wish to subject others to the same experience.
And Siren, since you wisely choose not to bother, I’ll take a shot at that IMITATION OF LIFE reference: is there a chance McWhorter has actually SEEN Sirk’s film? I can’t speak for the 1934 original, but Sirk’s version is probably the most Brechtian film of the 1950s if not of all time (I forget the source, but I remember reading somewhere that Sirk’s theatre work in Germany endeared him to none other than Bertold B. himself.) Anyone who thinks it’s about Lana Turner’s character has colossally missed the point.
Siren, I know you eloquently defended the film from a Jeff Wells-broadside a while back using that clip of Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner, but I think people who think that IMITATION OF LIFE “soft-pedals” racism or is some sort of spiritual ancestor to movies like THE HELP have probably forgotten about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1rMKj5oX9E
The only problem with that Youtube clip, by the way, is that it ends right before Lana Turner sighs contentedly while having her foot massage…taken with the preceding scene, it’s a “cut to” moment right up there with the smash-cut to the reporter’s dead body in PARALLAX VIEW or the “My God, you look like a GANGSTER” follow-up in GOODFELLAS.