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I haven't seen or read "The Help," so I don't know whether "it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen" -- with parts "so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on" (David Denby, The New Yorker) -- or whether "instead of plunging us into a racist past" the film "takes us on a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter" (Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal).
I do know that solid reviews like these consider what takes place on the screen, so you can tell whether or not you want to go -- and you can also tell, if you do go, where exactly you agree or disagree.
In an attempt to renew controversy over the validity of the book's portrayal of African-American women in the Jim Crow South, Lawrence O' Donnell's news-and-opinion show, "The Last Word," asked Tulane University professor Melissa Harris-Perry to review the film version of "The Help" on opening day.
O'Donnell told his audience that in one of her emails before she saw the movie, Harris-Perry said she was "incoherently angry."
Really? Before she saw the movie? Even if the book made her furious, shouldn't she have been open to the possibility that an adaptation can provide a radically different experience?
Some reviewers have said the movie of "The Help" does just that, precisely because of the complexity and zing that actors as gifted as Viola Davis and Octavia Stevens can bring to even the most unlikely roles.
But O'Donnell had to mention Davis for Harris-Perry to talk about her at all. Harris-Perry's "review" turned out to be partly a series of tweets she sent from the theater.
Was she tweeting from inside the cinema? If I were sitting anywhere near her, I would have called the manager to throw her out. And if she was at least trying to be considerate, and racing to the lobby to tweet -- how did she expect to get caught up in the flow of the movie?
Even when given a chance to discuss the film's particulars with O'Donnell, she really was incoherent, though not in any entertaining or revealing way. She appeared to blame the movie for using historical events as the background for a tale of domestic servitude -- for being "The Help" instead of "The Medgar Evers Story" -- and for resurrecting the stereotype of the Mammy. As if to counter Harris-Perry, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, on Movieline, "The 'black maid' may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?"
Harris-Perry said she worried that she'd be "framed" as a killjoy because she's an African-American academic criticizing a feel-good movie about a young white woman's coming-of-age (at least that's what "The Help" is according to Harris-Perry).
How do you see her from this review? As she fears -- as a "killjoy?" As an arrogant incompetent, as I see her in this segment? Or as something else altogether? You tell me.
