This is probably the hardest movie of the year to review. I feel alternately cool and warm towards it, as often the movie goes from a great scene to a terrible scene within five minutes. It’s just so hard to really say a movie that is half comedic about Civil Rights is really doing its job or really interested in the era. Ultimately, I think the movie is greater than the sum of its parts, and even though I could pick it apart (and will in the “What Doesn’t” section) I do think it’s worth seeing in a movie landscape that hasn’t had a real, quality adult film all summer. The movie’s surface theme is segregation but you shouldn’t expect to find a real examination of that issue so much as a dramatically sturdy study of a few women living in a certain time period.
What Works: Viola Davis is excellent in a quietly smoldering role. The movie desperately needs her to ground it amongst its more slapstick supporting characters and shallowly upbeat stretches. Also, I like that the movie exposes the great lie of segregation, which is that the races were truly segregated. Actually, the dehumanizing of African Americans led to a century of cheap labor for white families after slavery. They were still living more or less the same but calling slavery something different, “The Help” weren’t paid much better than if they weren’t working at all.
What Doesn’t: Still, the movie resists becoming deeper at every turn. Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain play large supporting roles (almost secondary leads) that are probably too broad to take up that much screen time. And I don’t know that Emma Stone was really the right actress to play the “lead” character of Skeeter Davis, once again perpetuating Hollywood notions that progress against segregation could only come from white characters. Stone doesn’t really have the right depth to unite the movie’s dramatic and comedic tones, and it becomes clear early on the director doesn’t either.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Things end much too upbeat for most of the characters, and the movie works overtime to expose the real ugliness of the time period, only having some hateful things fall out of the mouth of the lead villain, but sheltering the audience from the violence it only mentions. Still, I can quibble with casting or of some supporting characters taking up too much screen time, but I will say that as long as you treat this movie as a slice of life drama instead of something profound, you’ll have a more enjoyable experience than any other movie I’ve seen in a month.
Great review – I loved the move