Some readers who swept through my last post on Friday, which condemned Melissa Harris-Perry's reckless assault on "The Help," didn't register that I was attacking her haughtiness and sloppiness -- not defending the movie, because I hadn't seen it yet.
Now I've seen it, and I'm bewildered by the disconnect between the actual film -- which is flawed, to be sure, but also moving and funny and alive -- and the minstrel-like straw man that tired academic critics (including those on local talk shows) have been making of it.
The idea that this film slights the death of Medgar Evers? Absurd! The movie positions Evers as a key national figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, then makes his assassination the center of a frightening and heart-stabbing sequence.
The notion that the African-American cast is somehow demeaned by playing domestics? As Viola Davis said, "I've played lawyers and doctors who are less explored and more of an archetype than these maids."
Just as I was about to post this, a teacher friend, Paul Howe, sent me a link to a post that appeared on The Daily Howler yesterday (click here). The Howler writer has a lot of shrewd and funny points of his own to make about the controversy -- and also records how valuable it was for him to see the film in a packed house at the Rotunda on Tuesday afternoon.
Coincidentally, I saw "The Help" at the Senator with a couple of hundred people on Tuesday night. In an age when studios tend to target audiences with pinpoint demographic precision, this group was refreshingly diverse in age, race, and gender.
It was elating to be part of a crowd caught up in a film because of its story, characters and themes. Because this is such an unusual experience to get from a big American movie these days, almost everyone there was caught under its spell.
Rather than race to the rest rooms or the exit, most people sat in their seats and watched the end credits roll as the narrator, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a black maid in Jackson, Mississippi, started taking a long walk home. Then there was thunder-clap applause.
"The Help" is far from a great movie -- and I haven't read Kathryn Stockett's book, so I don't know whether it's a solid adaptation of a beloved popular novel. (It is good enough to make me want to read the book.) But it's involving and often touching, enraging and hilarious. Its errors (and it has some big ones) are cases of bad judgment, not blindness or pettiness or stupidity.
The story has its soapy elements. But at its core there's a cast-iron irony. In the Jim Crow South, the people who teach young white writer Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) that she can create an independent life for herself are women who lack the freedom to do it for themselves: the black domestics who not only clean white people's homes but also bring up their children.
It's a huge subject and a volatile canvas. The writer-director, Tate Taylor, doesn't always get the balance right between his brittle satire of Skeeter's socialite Junior League pals in Jackson -- they're as thin and shallow as the "social X-rays" in Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" -- and his robust, sensitive depiction of the working, home and church lives of the maids.
But he derives some divine tragicomedy from the friction between them -- and he vividly and eloquently conveys the dangers of the places where the two communities meet.
The film won me over a fifth of the way through. Skeeter, determined to record the experiences of black maids for her potential first book -- a project that could put all their lives (and certainly their livelihoods) at risk -- accosts Aibileen at the bus that transports domestics to and from their homes.
The way Taylor stages and shoots the scene, we see the bus roll off as Skeeter pushes her quest -- we know that Aibileen is partly thinking, "How am I going to get home, now?" -- and we're keenly aware that violent racists could be spying on them in open space. As Aibileen listens to Skeeter's plea, Viola Davis is so brilliant that even when the maid is standing silent, she gets across a galvanizing blend of wariness, concern and pity for Skeeter's naivete. And, in a tricky role, Stone doesn't flinch at suggesting the blindness that's mixed in with Skeeter's ambition and idealism. The director and his cast, without raising their voices or hyping the tension with sound effects and music, put this casual vignette in a pressure-cooker.
In effect, the director makes a promise to the audience with that scene. He's pledging that he and his actors are going to leap from the gimmicky set-up into areas that are complicated and authentic, including the risks of true friendship and the challenges of being moral and political in daily life. He makes good on the promise again and again -- and not just with Davis' Aibileen and Stone's Skeeter. Octavia Spencer as Aibileen's best friend, a mouthier maid named Minny Jackson, gives the performance of the movie, with a range that goes from pathos to comic indomitability. She and the miraculous Jessica Chastain -- forgettable in "The Tree of Life," Chastain is superbly earthy-fragile as Celia Foote, the "white-trash" outsider intent on crashing the Junior League -- forge a multifaceted relationship that is one of the glories of this movie year (at least until the fairy-tale climax).
The director doesn't always fulfill his promise. Aibileen warns Skeeter that she'll tell her about blacks' feelings toward whites in ways that will make her uncomfortable. We should see that, and we don't. Even worse, Taylor cuts short the pungent scene when a roomful of maids gather to tell their stories. They speak to the core of the movie -- and I could have listened to them for hours.
It's a pity that Taylor doesn't give us more of them. But it's a tribute to him and his actors that they leave us wanting more. I'll be writing about other aspects of "The Help" and its actors, especially once I read the book. It's the rare summer film that fills you up. It sticks to your ribs -- and to your memory.
