THE HELP - the Driving Miss Daisy de nos jours

Tate Taylor, director of the anonymous 2008 comedy PRETTY UGLY PEOPLE, somehow managed to get the studios to allow to write and direct THE HELP, a soupy drama based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Not having read Stockett's novel chronicling the travails in 1960s racist Mississippi, I don't know whether the emotional manipulation and superficial politics come from her of from the director.  Either way, the resulting movie looks handsome, and made me shed a tear in the final reel, but has all the genuine engagement with the issues of DRIVING MISS DAISY.  It's a bland feelgood movie about a topic that should make us angry and agitated.  It's a movie in which the main African American character's son is lynched and yet we come out feeling warm and fluffy.  Double plus not good.

The film makes the mistake of telling the stories of these African-American maids through the lens of a perky white wannabe journalist - Skeeter (Emma Stone) - a move that immediately tells us we're in a world where a harsh tale has to be made palatable for a mainstream audience.  Ironic, also, in a movie that makes such a big deal about going right to the source.  Skeeter serves as the vessel through which the maids will dish the dirt and get their story published.  The movie is scrupulous in telling us that Skeeter is sharing the royalties with her informants - but while she gets a cool job in New York out of it - they are at risk of being sacked, imprisoned or lynched. The risks and rewards are clearly completely asymmetric, but the film doesn't embrace and mine that fact - it would mess up the fluffy finale.

Worse still, there is no subtlety in the characterisation - no shades of grey. You're either a good-hearted liberal white (Skeeter, her shamed and reformed mother, Jessica Chastain's character Celia), or a nasty racist white (Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly and her acolytes).  And as for the African-American women they are largely painted in tones of full-on heroism, with even the thief seen as a martyr to a mean mistress.   As for the subject matter, awful, horrible petty racism is seen on screen, but racial violence is referred to rather than shown.  Ditto the subject matter of domestic abuse.  And I couldn't help feeling insulted that the subject of vengeance against racism was reduced to a scatological joke. 

All this isn't to say that the production isn't handsome - with lush on location lensing from DP Stephen Goldblatt (JULIE & JULIA) and wonderful period costumes.  And the female cast is good quality and does the best with the narrowly written characters they are given.  In particular, it was a joy to finally see Jessica Chastain able to round out a character - rather than just being a virtuous icon, as in THE TREE OF LIFE and CORIOLANUS.  

But this movie, so hyped, so likely to win awards, is not a good movie. It's politics are dicey - it's reluctance to truly grasp the profundity of what it's tackling frustrating - it's emotional manipulation dishonest.  I have no time for it.  

THE HELP was released in the autumn in the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Sweden. It was released in October in Portugal, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, Singapore, France, Ireland, the UK and Spain. It was released in November in Spain, Hungary, Poland, Malta, Estonia, Denmark, Greece, Kuwait and India.  It opens on December 8th in Germany; on December 28th in Belgium; on Dcember 29th in the Netherlands; on January 20th in Italy; on February 3rd in Bulgaria and on February 6th in Brazil.  THE HELP is likely to be feted during awards season judging by the studio campaign and early indications from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Hollywood Film Festival.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 3 - 50/50

Anna Kendrick, Will Reiser and Seth Rogen present 50/50

50/50 is that most difficult of tricks to pull off - a movie that is both raucously funny and genuinely affecting.  For that we have to thank the loosely autiobiographical screenplay from Will Reiser and direction from Jonathan Levine (THE WACKNESS, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE) that keeps the movie in delicate balance.  That balance is key - because this movie is about a young man struggling to beat an aggressive cancer, enduring chemo and surgery, and even then only with a 50/50 chance of survival. It's the subject matter of afternoon TV movies and melodramas.  What saves us (mostly) from emotional manipulation is the the brutal honesty and hilarity with which the topic is treated - everything from getting high on medical-strength weed, to trashing a flaky ex-girlfriends painting with eggs and knives, to exploiting having cancer to get laid by sympathetic chicks.  In other words, Reiser manages to avoid mawkishness (at least until the final fifteen minutes) by transforming his experience of cancer treatment into a "bromance" complete with adult humour.  To that end, the absolute hear of the flick is the relationship between Jospeh Gordon-Levitt as the cancer victim and all-round good egg, and Kyle - the kind of typically loud-mouthed, vulgar but heart-of-gold character that Seth Rogen always plays. The supporting cast is also first class, with Angelica Huston adding dramatic weight as Adam's mother; Anna Kendrick showing her comedic chops as Adam's therapist; and Bryce Dallas Howard deliciously shitty and cast against type as Adam's girlfriend.  If I have a criticism of this otherwise superb movie, it's that one might feel emotionally manipulated in the final reel.  I can see that intellectually, but I totally bought into the relationships in the film, was right their with Kyle in the waiting room during Adam's surgery, and enjoyed every minute of the experience.  

50/50 played Toronto and London 2011. It played Aspen where it won the Audience Award and  Hollywood where Joseph Gordon-Levitt won the Breakthrough Award for Actor of the Year. 50/50 opened in the USA in September. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in France on November 16th; in Hong Kong and the Netherlands on November 17th; in the UK on November 25th; in Hungary and Japan on December 1st; in Sweden on December 2nd; andin Ireland on January 4th.

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE - a world of bad hair colour and worse CGI

So, in an evening of girlie bonding my early twenties cousin and I went to see the third installment of the immensely popular Twilight series, ECLIPSE. Not that either of us could be called fan-girls. I’ve read the first book and seen the first two films: my cousin had only seen the first film. We proclaim no membership of either Team Jacob or Team Edward. But, along we went, open-minded, and if nothing else, happy to be in the lovely big Extreme screens in the Vue Westfield. Two hours later we emerged from a world of bad hair-dye, bad CGI effects and hammy dialogue. For this, my friends, is not a movie of high quality trying to appeal to the neutral movie-goer. Rather, ECLIPSE takes its audience’s buy-in for granted and delivers a workman-like condensed version of the novel, with the cheapest visual effects and wigs it can find. Seriously – the wolves bounce through the forests with little heft, much like Ang Lee’s HULK – and the crimes against hair colour perpetrated by Emmett Cullen and Rosalie Hale disgrace a big-budget film.

As the movie opens, we see our heroine Bella Swan torn between the two boys who love. The first is Edward Cullen – ancient vampire in the body of teen heart-throb – who won’t deflower her until they’re married, and for whom she would have to become a vampire. The second candidate is Jacob Black – ridiculously buff teen werewolf – who is happy to keep Bella warm (sadly, this saga being ludicrously chaste, we can read no double-entendre here) and offer her a romantic life that doesn’t involve dying. So follow two hours of hackneyed dialogue as each boy declares his love for Bella, and Bella looks sulky in response. At the end of which, she declares that the decision was never really about who she loved more but about who she wanted to be. This struck me as a rather unconvincing last minute attempt to give movie that is basically about a chick being dependent on two guys for her physical safety (evil mean red-headed vampire wants to kill her with her “new-born” vampire army) some kind of feminist cred. It would’ve bought into it more if during the course of the film, Bella had talked about this journey to self-realisation with her dad or her friends, or the two boys in her life. Overall then, I remain unconvinced by the whole Twilight phenomenon. The heroine is sulky: the vampires are unsexy: the werewolves on steroids: the CGI sucks: and basically very very little happens indeed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why David Slade, director of edgy indie hit HARD CANDY, would want to helm such a mainstream, banal movie, other than, of course, for the paycheque.

Additional tags: Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick, Ashley Greene, Elizabeth Reaser

TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE is on global release.