I Need Somebody: "The Help"

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

As a film viewer I always try to view a film as what it is rather than what it's not. This becomes a little difficult with a film like The Help where, regardless of how good the acting and how earnest it's intentions are, it's hard not to be aware of some of the problems in its depiction of the era in which it takes place. In this review, I'll try to balance a reading of the film just as it is but also address the film's more controversial aspects.

The Help is based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett and is essentially about a young woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) in 1960s Mississippi who returns home after graduating journalism school. She wants to write about what concerns her and decides to focus on black maids who are mistreated by their employers. She writes down the stories of numerous maids, anoymously publishing a book called The Help. Now, with just this short synopsis, the main problem people have with The Help becomes apparent, which is it sounds like another film where a black person's story is told through the perspective of a white character who becomes a saviour figure. I think the emphasis on the white characters is an enevitable problem in a story like this where the focus is on the relationship between these women, both black and white. But while The Help does have this "white emphasis" problem, it doesn't completely define the film.

The reason it doesn't completely define the film is because despite Skeeter being the writer of the book, the only character who narrates the film is Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), one of the maids Skeeter interviews. She's the first face we see in the film and the character who finally closes the film with both her actions and her narration. Essentially, Aibileen is spiritually the main character. In fact, I find the Skeeter character  more of a device for the Aibileen character's journey than the other way around. The most interesting thing about The Help, I would say, is while it seemingly tells its story through a white perspective, the real journey at the film heart is Aibileen's

The one sub plot which I really felt had to go was the one between Skeeter and her love interest Stewart (Chris Lowell). While I can understand this subplot is used to give the character of Skeeter some texture, it feels beside the point of the film. It also lends itself to the "white emphasis criticism." I did like the story between Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), another maid Skeeter interviews and Aibileen's friend, and Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain). Celia is an outsider from the circle of society women because she was born working class. She also married the ex boyfriend of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). Both Minny and Celia are outsiders in their own ways. Minny is fired by Hilly after she uses Hilly's bathroom. Being outsiders is what draws Minny and Celia together thematically and personally. Some have said the Minny character is a caricature more than character but I thought Spencer brought a lot of wisdom and authentic humour to the part. Chastain, who appeared in quite a few films last year, is a wonderfully versatile actress. Like Spencer, she takes a character who could be a caricature and makes her in to someone lovable, sweet and very human.

The outsider relationship between Minny and Celia is a parralel of the relationship between Aibileen and Skeeter. While Aibileen isn't fired like Minny, she's still an outsider among outsiders, black maids working in a white world. Skeeter is more of a mental outsider. While she's part of the circle of society ladies, she represents a modern woman who wants to bring about change. Ironically, it's her inclusion within society which allows her to subltly go about deconstructing it.

Returning to the notion of Skeeter being a device for Aibileen, I didn't mean this as a negative in regards to Skeeter's character, just that I think Aibileen's journey is more important than Skeeter's. I also  think Aibileen and Skeeter both need each other. Skeeter needs to connect with Aibileen in order to understand what it means to be a black woman at this time. At the beginning of the film, we see Aibileen's face and Skeeter's voice asking what it feels like to raise white children while your own child is at home. This question seems to be the most important question in the film and what Skeeter needs to understand yet paradoxically can never understand. Aibileen needs Skeeter to give her a push to tell her story and an outlet in which to do so. The closing narration implies Aibileen is the real author of the book or at least will become a real author after her relationship with Skeeter.

Viola Davis gives a really lived in performance. From her first moments on screen, you feel this is an authentic human being and a woman who has been a maid for much of her life. Emma Stone is beautiful and sexy as always. She's possesses the charm and energy and make us fall in love with Skeeter. But in contrast to Aibileen, Skeeter and Stone are not old enough for the character to feel as lived in as Aibileen. That's not a knock against Stone nor is something negative. The contrast between the two, one who has truly lived a life and one whose life is only just beginning, make a interesting partnership.

Bryce Dallas Howard has the sweet faced innocence which contrasts well with her character Hilly's ugly personality. I wish the character had been more complex instead of merely being the villain.

Minny tells Skeeter and Aibileen how she got back at Hilly for firing her. Minny baked a pie made out of her own shit. It's a funny scene but it represents the problem this film has with tone. On the one hand, the film does have some nice comedic moments, including a scene where Aibileen and Minny make fun of the society women, but it's also trying to be an honest drama about the time period. The pie scene feels out of place in a film which is dealing with racism, an assissination and the fear of death.

The film also suffers from being all over the place with its focus. This does give the film a lived in quality and allows us to feel like we're part of this world but I felt sometimes the progression of scenes and events don't feel organic. This stalls the momentum. I would have liked for the emphasis to be more on the writing of the book and the aftermath of it being published. By the time the book is published, there's a confrontation between Skeeter and Hilly and then between Aibileen and Hilly, then the film ends.

Still, I enjoyed this film due to its humour, characters and performances. I think the director Tate Taylor, who is Stockett's childhood friend, gives his actors breathing room within the frame and a scene. He's not intrusive and I feel hs direction is more subtle than his script.

And when Aibileen walks away at the end of the film down a symbolic open road, I think you truly want to know what happened to her. That's a testament to the story, which does make Aibileen the most soulful and interesting character, and of course, to Davis' performance

Movie Journal # 1

The Tree of Life (Dir. Terrence Malick, 2011)- A film of contradictions- epic yet intimate, cosmological yet earthbound, confusing yet crystal clear, similar to Terrence Malick's other works yet feeling like his most personal, but while personal, the film is extremely universal. The Tree of Life was one of the most polarizing films of 2011- and as a friend once told me, that may be a sign of greatness. Brad Pitt gives what is arguably his best performance as an authoritarian father, Mr. O'Brien, in 1950s Texas. Pitt expertly captures a particular type of father figure, very strict, yet with a deep love buried inside of him. Early in the film, we get a flashforward of him finding out his 19 year old son has died, he talks about his guilt at treating him so poorly. This confession reverberates throughout the film. Jessica Chastain is ethereal and gorgeous as the mother of the three children. She is the "grace" to  Mr O'Brien's "nature." I don't think the the film has any fixed meanings. It's more concerned with asking questions about choices made in our childhood and throughout our life, as well as our place in the universe, and why we should act good even when people suffer.

The Descendents (Dir. Alexander Payne, 2011)- Director  Alexander Payne's first film since his excellent 2004 film Sideways, Payne chronicles the troubles of Hawaiian lawyer Matt King, played by George Clooney. Matt's wife is in a coma after a sailing boat accident, his two daughters are out of his control, and he has to decide to whom to sell the land his family owns. Payne does an fine job of taking Matt on a emotional journey without having to completely change him or making it seem he doesn't have to grow anymore. The film ends with a simple image of a family on a couch. They still have a lot to learn, but at least they each other.

50/50 (Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2011)- 50/50 walks a tightrope between humour and sadness, levity and anger. The film manages to not have its humour make too light of Joseph Gordan Levitt's Adam's cancer, nor be so depressing it becomes a chore to sit through. It's actually the film's allowance of humourous moments which makes the quieter moments of anxiety and sadness hit quite hard. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky criticized the film as being a romantic comedy with a cancer gimmick, in regards to Adam's relationship to his young therapist, Katherine, played by Anna Kendrick. I actually admired the film for not going down that direction. Their relationship is only one aspect of the film and is allowed to develop throughout the film. It never takes  precedence over the cancer dilemma. The performances are all strong. The only drawback is this: Seth Rogen is good in the film but it's easy to become too aware of the Seth Rogen persona seeping in.

Paul (Dir. Greg Mottola, 2011)- While not as funny as it should be, with the director of Superbad and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost writing, Paul, the story of two sci-fi buffs encountering a real life extra terrestrial, is still a enjoyable comedy. The chemistry between Pegg, Frost, Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) and Kristen Wiig, a christian fundamentalist who runs a motor park with her father, who finds herself in the company of the odd trio. The digs at her character's christianity seem a little gratuitous. I also didn't understand what was tying the together thematically. I think Mottola's previous two films Superbad and Adventureland were stronger movies on this front. At the end of the film Paul jokes about what the characters have learned throughout the film and I feel the movie has the same kind of attitude. It cares about its characters but doesn't develop them enough. Bill Hader, Joe Lo Truglio and Jason Bateman are all good as agents chasing after Paul and Blythe Danner adds some pathos as the older version of the girl who saved Paul when he first crash landed on Earth over sixty years ago.

The Skin I Live In (Dir. Pedro Almodovar, 2011)- My first Almodovar film. It reminded of Hitchcock, not so much in tone or style but thematically. In Hitchcock's films, he shows that sexuality and obession can go hand in hand, particularly in the male psyche. Almodovar's film does the same thing and creates an even more twisted version of Vertigo for the 21st century. Antonio Banderas, miles away from Puss 'n' Boots, plays Dr. Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who has created a synthetic skin which resists damage. He has tested it on a mysterious woman named Vera (Elena Anaya). I don't want to reveal too much. It's best to go in without too much knowledge. I feel there could have been more development in some areas, particularly in Robert's relationship with his wife and daughter, but it's a film which, pardon the pun, truly gets under your skin.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Dir. Lynne Ramsay, 2011)- A horror film grounded in the real life consequences of negligence and timidness, We Need to Talk About Kevin took me a while to get in to. But once I settled in, the character of Kevin, the child of Tilda Swinton's Eva, who even at a young age displays bizarre behaviour,  truly unnerved me. My nerves weren't helped by Ezra Miller's performance as teenage Kevin. The film is about the lead up to going on a killing spree at his high school, a puzzle which as all the pieces come together, things become more complicated. This is because the film asks us about responsibility and whether blame is ever a simple solution.

Sherlock Holmes (Dir. Guy Ritchie, 2009)- I actually enjoyed this more the second time I watched it. I like how the film allows Sherlock (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) to be themselves. Holmes, the stuffy yet eccentric super slueth, and Watson, the dogged companion of Holmes. Of all American actors, Downey, Jr. is arguably the best choice for Holmes since Downey, Jr. can play the eccentricity needed for Holmes' character. The supernatural plot does pay off nicely at the end and I enjoyed this aspect of the film more the second time around. I liked Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler and thought it was interesting to have her and Holmes' relationship already established at the beginning of the film. The same goes for Holmes and Watson's relationship. The film doesn't waste time on being an origin story or being about the beginning of Holmes and Watson's relationship. The film centers on how their relationship is being broken apart by Watson's impending marriage. The film could almost be a sequel.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Dir. Guy Ritchie, 2011)- I had a really mixed reaction to this film, even more so than when I saw the first film. It seems like it can't decide if it wants to be large scale or small scale. Thankfully there's enough small scale stuff which allows the movie to breathe and, like the first film, it allows Holmes and Watson to be themselves. The film ends not with a big action sequence but with Holmes and Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) conducting a literal and figurative chess match. I also liked seeing Watson putting his deductive reasoning to the test. The ending has a great reference to the source material and the last scene is funny and suggests something...different for the future.

An analysis of "M. Night Shyamalan's The Village"

                                                                                  

Warning: Spoilers Ahead 

I'm interested to see how director M. Night Shyamalan will be percieved thirty or fifty years from now. I'll be in my seventies by then and I'll either be telling my grandkids how poorly recieved some of his films used to be even if they're looked upon more fondly by then, or I may be having to explain why I like elements of his films that people still hate. I would hope The Sixth Sense (1999) his breakthrough film would retain the stature it has now and would have evolved in to an acknowledged horror classic. I think something like Unbreakable, which some actually regard as his best film also seems like a film which could gain in stature. I also think Signs, which is my favourite of Shyamalan's films, should be reavaluated. In particular, I'm interested to see how  The Village ages. The Village is a film that invokes strong emotions from people. In a way, I think its practically impossible to have a neurtral opinion on this film, you either hate it and think Shyamalan's signature twist ending silly and cheap, or you love it, thinking it has quite a beautiful love story at its center, and is an interesting parrable on the time in which it was made.

In the late seventies an American history professor named Edward Walker (William Hurt) approached a group of people he met at a grief counselling clinic after his father was murdered with an idea. The idea was to use his wealthy father's money to build a secluded town in the middle of a nature preserve. The elders also create a myth of "those we do not speak of," creatures that haunt the woods but do not come in to the village because of a truce. The elders have also set the clock back to the 19th century. As the film opens we see from the tombstone of August Nicholson's (Brendan Gleeson) recently deceased son that it is 1897 within this self contained world. Now, what I have just said about the creation of the village is only revealed at end of the film and I think this may be where the problems with the film start. The concept of people overcome by grief who retreat in to a artficially created world is for me fascinating. Thinking about The Village's twists, I'd wish Shymalan would have disregarded the twist ending and played the film straight, revealing this twist early on, and possibly showing flashbacks to the seventies. This is not to say that an absence of flashbacks in the film is a huge flaw; that single photograph Shymalan shows us near the end of the film with the elders of the village is extremely haunting, particularly with the voiceover of the actors discussing what brought them to the grief counselling center. I like the implications of the ending but I feel that Shyamalan leaves us with these implications rather than fully explore them. Now, to be fair, he does explore issues of innocence, fear, bravery and seclusion throughout the film, themes which relate to the ending, but they are explored while tip toeing around the actual situation these characters are in; and even on subsequent viewings this tip toeing is still present.

What I find most interesting about the first twist in this film is how Shyamalan is using his most familar trademark to order to subvert the expectations of a M. Night Shyamalan film. His three previous films, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), stayed true to the supernatural or other worldly aspects that were established in the films, and actually reinforced by the endings. In The Sixth Sense, Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is one of the ghosts Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is able to see; in Unbreakable, Elijah Prince (Samuel L. Jackson) is the supervillian to David Dunn's (Bruce Willis) superhero, and in Signs, the aliens are revealed to be completely real. In The Village, on the other hand, the first twist subverts the supernatural aspects of the film, revealing The Village to be very different than his previous three films. We of course learn that the creatures are not real when Edward reveals the truth to his blind daughter Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). The final twist, which establishes that the villagers are not in the 19th century but in the 21st, can also be seen as subverting the expectations of a Shyamalan film because we have also come to expect that the worlds Shyamalan's characters occupy are also going to stay true to what has been established, which also relates to the presence of the supernatural.

By not revealing the secrets of the village until the end, Shyamalan seems to want it both ways in this film: he wants to provide a supernatural mystery that became his signature in The Sixth Sense but at the same subvert these expectations and provide a religious and political parrable that is pretty much distanced from the supernatural. I think the balance pretty much works because Shyamalan is pretty light on the suspense sequences in this film. Seeing the film knowing the twist, I think one can sense that Shyamalan is already preparing the audience for the realization that the supernatural does have as firm existence as in his previous films, as well as allowing the audience to adjust themselves to the fact that this is Shyamlan's first genuine romance film. Romance was there in The Sixth Sense but I think the romance of the film only becomes apparent in the last scene. I do really like the romance between Lucius and Ivy, particularly the porch scene where Ivy asks Lucius if he'll dance with her on their wedding night.

Ivy and Lucius are two points of a love triangle that also includes the mentally challenged Noah Percy (Adrien Brody). I find that Brody's performance is both limited in terms of screen time and also character dimension. I think Shyamalan made Noah mentally challenged to make him more sympathethic as well as reinforce how the fear of the outside world stopped the elders or anyone else going to get medicine to help Noah's condition. He is sympathetic but as I said, he's too much of a cypher. I believe that Shyamalan is dealing with the most characters up to this point in his filmography, particularly compared to his previous film Signs. I feel that juggling this amount of characters makes Shyamalan not so much unsure of who is important but that everyone seems to become important but many of characters aren't developed enough. I find it disappointing that Lucius gets stabbed by a jealous Noah about an hour in to the film, then spending the rest of the film in a coma, particularly since it seemed that it arch wasn't yet completed. I think Lucius should have gotten sick so then he could still regain consciousness and still feel a part of the story aside from just a character who needs to be saved.

This is not only Shyamalan's first genuine romance film but it's also his first female driven film, with Ivy becoming the one who ventures to the towns to save the man she loves' life. Sigourney Weaver, who plays Lucius's mother, probably saw a connection between the emergence of Ivy as the heroine and the character she played in Alien, Ellen Ripley, who by the end of that film became the heroine, and thus becoming  the central frigure of the Alien franchise. Ivy of course is a softer character than Ripley, more vulnerable I find. I've always loved Howard's performance in this film. I think her performance has the most life to it than the rest of the cast, which I feel is intentional. She has a transcendent, almost otherworldy quality to her in this film, which is why we can believe that the reserved Lucius could fall in love with her. I also like Phoenix in this film; he conveys conviction and a bravery in the face of fear, a fear that he later states relates to Ivy's safety, very well.

While Shyamalan's screenwriting can be fairly criticized, I think that Shaymalan's visual sense, his feel for composition and editing, is something that even his distractors could learn to admire. Some of his images could even be paintings, they're so well thought out and quietly beautiful, particularly in the porch scene.Unfortunately, One feels like Shyamalan's formalism can feel too constricting, that he is too much focused on his carefully storyboarded images than moving every single scene forward as dynamically as he should.

When The Village was released in the summer of 2004, the Second Gulf War had only just begun the year prior, and the events of September 11, 2001 had happened less than three years prior. I think the film speaks to the time in which it was made, as well as the years following its release because it captures the fear of the "other" that I think was and still is prevalent today in Northern America. Many of Shyamlan's films deal with the element of fear and how one confronts his or her fears, whether it be Cole in The Sixth Sense, who sees ghosts, Elijah in Unbrekable, who is afraid of not having a purpose in the world, or Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) in Signs, afraid of not being able to protect his family. The Village, at its core is about how fear of our world can make people want to hide away from it, to go back to a simpler time. This same fear is what the elders use to subjugate the other villagers, except they disguise it with the myths of the creatures.

I'm still divided about The Village but I nevertheless love parts of this film and overall I like it. It is a continuing fascinating exploration of how fear can corrupt the human experience yet even in the most morally ambiguous of situations, hope can still presevere.