The Help

Posted on August 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic material
Profanity:	Some strong language, racist terms of the era
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some graphic scenes of a miscarriage, disturbing material about pre Civil Rights-era racial discrimination, references to murder of Medgar Evers
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 10, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 5, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005J6LKVI

The book-club favorite about African-American women working as domestics in the early Civil Rights era South has been lovingly turned into a film that like its source material engages with its sensitive subject matter humbly and sincerely.

Kathryn Stockett grew up in Jackson, Mississippi and was devoted to her family’s “help,” which inspired her first novel, the story of Skeeter, an awkward girl just out of college (Emma Stone) who persuades the women who work as domestics to tell her their stories for a book. This is a minefield of an idea, which may be one reason the book was rejected 60 times. We are rightly sensitive about the presumption of a white woman acting as interpreter or, even worse, as liberator. And Stockett had her African-American characters speaking in dialect. There can be no better proof that we have still not figured out how to handle these issues than this summer’s cover of Vanity Fair with a bikini-clad photo of Stone, describing her on the inside of the magazine as the “star” of “The Help.” She is not the star, just as her character is not the author of the book she produces. She is the ingenue. The stars of the story are the maids played by Viola Davis (Aibileen Clark) and Octavia Spencer (Minny Jackson). Entertainment Weekly did a much better job. All three actresses appear on the cover, with a headline: “How do you turn a beloved, racially charged book into a moving, funny film? Very carefully.”

That is thanks to Stockett’s closest childhood friend, Tate Taylor, who grew up with her in Jackson, who optioned the book before it was published, and who wrote and directed the film, and who insisted it be shot in Mississippi and that it reflect the South he knew.

Skeeter is accepted by the ladies who run things in Jackson, but she does not fit in. She is not married and hopes for something beyond bridge club luncheons and dinner-dances. She applies for a job at the local newspaper and is hired to do the household hints column. Since she knows nothing about cooking, cleaning, or laundry, she asks her friend’s maid, Aibeleen, for help. As they talk, she becomes more aware of the bigotry around her and of her own failure to oppose it. She begins to wonder about the lives of the women who raise the children and feed the families in her community but are not permitted to use the bathrooms that they scrub. A New York publisher (Mary Steenburgen) encourages her to collect their stories for a ground-breaking book. Skeeter asks Aibeleen and Minny to help her, knowing that she may be putting them at risk of losing their jobs, or worse. Privately, Skeeter works on the book. Quietly, and then less quietly, she works to oppose a local initiative to require all homes to build separate “colored” bathrooms.

The woman behind the initiative is Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), ostensibly Skeeter’s best friend and the alpha girl in their community. It is less a matter of prejudice than a struggle for power, but that just makes Skeeter’s refusal to go along more inflammatory. Meanwhile, Hilly has fired Minny, who goes to work for Celia (Jessica Chastain), a pretty blonde from the lower class who does not realize that she is being frozen out by the society ladies of the town. And the more Hilly feels threatened, the more the pushes for her “sanitation” initiative.

Taylor said that Greenwood, Mississippi is closer to what Jackson looked like in the 60’s than Jackson is now and the period detail pulls us into the story. Octavia Spencer, playing a part she helped to inspire, does not let Minny become a caricature and Viola Davis gives another richly layered performance as the quieter Aibeleen. If Howard makes Hilly a little too shrill (and the ending more upbeat than would have been possible in that era) it is understandable given the changing times. No one would believe today that such a short time ago, blatant virulence could be so casual, which is why the conversations this movie will prompt are so important. And Stockett deserves credit for her care in acknowledging moments of generosity and affection on all sides in spite of the restrictions of the era.

This is an involving drama with respect for its characters that has some important points to make about race and gender, about the past that still haunts us, about friendship and passion, and most of all about the transformative power of stories, the ones we tell and the ones we listen to. As Douglas Adams wrote:

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

“The Help” does not pretend to be perfect, but it is an honorable step forward and one of the most heartwarming dramas of the year.

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The Change-Up

Posted on August 4, 2011 at 6:45 pm

The movie has barely begun and Dave (Jason Bateman) already has projectile baby poop all over his face and in his mouth. There is so much excretory material in this film that doctors specializing in intestinal and urinary issues could probably get some continuing education credits for watching it.

It’s yet another body-switching movie, “Freaky Friday” with baby poop and (very) grown-up female nudity. It’s as if they took Goofus and Gallant from the pages of Highlights Magazine and put them in a screenplay that channels Judd Apatow (providing the raunch, the perpetually juvenile male, the fear of women, and the warm-hearted valentine to Leslie Mann) and Adam Sandler (puerile comedy, the perpetually juvenile male, the dislike of women, and the odd combination of treacly sentiment and brutal slapstick). The screenwriters of “The Hangover” and the director of “The Wedding Crashers” bring some high spirits and good-natured affection for their characters.

Dave is Gallant, a good husband, a good father, and a good lawyer, who loves his family but feels that he never has a moment for himself, between working on a big deal that will decide whether he makes partner, giving the twins their three a.m. bottles, and making it to “dialog night” with his wife. Dave’s lifelong friend is Goofus, I mean Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), whose primary occupations are smoking pot, and sleeping with as many girls as possible. His only successful achievement is disappointing his father (Alan Arkin). At that, he excels.

The two of them go out to watch a game at a sports bar. On the way home, they stop to pee in a fountain, and somehow that switches their souls. The next morning, Mitch wakes up in Dave’s bed, in Dave’s body, and Dave wakes up in Mitch’s bachelor apartment and rockin’ Sexiest Man Alive/looks-great-in-the-Green-Lantern-super-suit bod.

In a plot twist from body-switching movie “Big,” the magical fountain has been moved, and it will take a while for the local bureaucracy to track it down so they can pee themselves back to normal. And that gives Dave and Mitch a chance to live each other’s lives, alternating fantasy and excruciating humiliation, often simultaneously.

Dave takes Mitch’s body to what he says is his big opportunity as an actor. It turns out to be a “lorno” — light porno, which requires the straight-laced family man who got a vicarious thrill from his friend’s description of his highly varied sex life to get some non-vicarious misery. Meanwhile, Mitch as Dave manages to say the wrong thing in a crucial meeting and derail the big deal that would have made Dave a partner in his firm and at the three am feeding in the kitchen he puts the twins down next to the knives and electric sockets.

It is more fun to watch the two guys ease into each other’s lives. Dave rediscovers the pleasures of having time for himself. And Mitch for the first time discovers what it is to see something through. (And to see the kind of highly personal and private moments that only married couples allow each other to see.)

There’s not a lot of acting here; this is not “Face-Off,” where Nicolas Cage and John Travolta made a preposterous idea work with cleverly layered performances. Reynolds never masters Bateman’s dry delivery and Bateman’s attempt to incorporate Mitch’s wink looks more like a nervous tic. And the very talented Leslie Mann is underused in yet another disappointed wife role, especially when her “husband” forgets the very important “dialog night” and says he does not find her attractive. (She also does a nude scene that makes it hard to imagine anyone would forget her or find her anything but extremely attractive.) Olivia Wilde has some fun as a lawyer who has elements of both Dave and Mitch, giving warmth and a little vulnerability to a character who would otherwise just be a superficial fantasy figure.

The film’s strength is less its outrageousness than its unpretentiousness. This film has no ambition beyond making the audience laugh and it is good-natured enough to keep us on its side.

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Comedy

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Posted on July 29, 2011 at 9:55 am

This painful comedy about the agonies of love has some deftly observed moments and strong performances but its essential tawdriness overwhelms its efforts to be cuddly and life-affirming.

Everyone is miserably in love with the wrong person. Steve Carell plays Cal, married for almost 25 years to his teenage sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore), who tells him in the opening scene that she wants a divorce. Their 13-year-old son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (the heart-twistingly vulnerable Analeigh Tipton). Jessica has a crush on Cal. Emily slept with her co-worker, David (Kevin Bacon). Cal goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets someone who is not miserable and not in love: Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who takes a different beautiful woman home from the bar every night. Jacob tells Cal that he lost Emily because he lost his sense of what it means to be a man. For Jacob, being a man means pitching the New Balance shoes and ill-fitting suits and manipulating women to have sex by pretending to listen to them. Cal is soon channeling his inner playa, first seducing a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) and then a series of montaged lovelies. Meanwhile, Robbie is texting romantic pleas to Jessica and Jessica is following the advice of a classmate and taking nude photos of herself to give to Cal and Emily is dating David, whose role seems to be nice guy whose unfitness for love is demonstrated by everyone’s intended-to-be-funny-but-not-funny-at-all inability to pronounce his last name correctly.

Got that? Then, just as Jacob’s method begins to work for Cal, it stops working for Jacob. The one woman who turned him down is Hannah (Emma Stone), a recent law graduate studying for the bar exam. Circumstances lead her to return to the bar to proposition Jacob and back at his sleek bachelor pad something unprecedented happens — a night of real intimacy, talking and laughing. Now Jacob needs advice on his uncharted territory: how to be a part of a relationship that lasts more than 24 hours.

There’s an inexpressibly lovely moment as Emily calls Cal, not realizing he is right outside their house because he sneaks over at night to maintain the garden (metaphor alert). She tells him she is in the basement trying to restart the pilot light but he can see she is upstairs and just needed an excuse to call. And Stone continues to be one of the most endearingly honest, intelligent, and expressive performers on screen. She shows us how the flurry of mixed emotions she feels that first night with Jacob flicker across her face as she tries to manage her feelings of confidence and fear, longing and logic.

But that is not enough to make up for the smarminess of the story’s assumptions and the characters’ behavior. There’s an excruciating climactic scene in which two of the characters made humiliating public declarations that are intended to be gallant but come off as self-indulgent and completely inappropriate. And other than Hannah, the characters are just not very nice. Jessica keeps telling us she loves Cal because he is such a kind man and great father. Not from what we see. He shows little concern for what his children are going through with their parents’ separation or anything else they are going through. He does not know who his son’s teacher is. And he is awful to the women he sleeps with, which the movie seems to think is fine. When one of them becomes angry at him because he never called her, she is portrayed as shrewish and unreasonable. Jacob, whose only evidence of responsibility or being aware of anyone else’s needs or feelings is his decision to help Cal become a lady-killer, provides very little reason other than hotness for deserving Hannah’s love or making any effort to earn it. The film is as callous toward the one-night-stands who get tossed aside as Jacob and Cal are. There is no suggestion that someone should give them pointers on how to respect themselves enough not to fall for manipulative cads. Even worse is the treatment of the Jessica/Robbie relationship. She is, we are repeatedly told, 17. Taking nude pictures of herself to give to a man is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible signal to a prospective romantic partner but probably a crime. Giving those pictures to a 13-year-old is portrayed in the film as an act of compassionate generosity when it is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible mixed message but definitely a crime. The movie is going for a wistful romanticism. For me it was more like a pervy sociopathy.

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Comedy Date movie Romance

Cowboys & Aliens

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 6:28 pm

The last word I thought I’d be using about a movie called “Cowboys & Aliens” is “realistic,” but what I like best about this film is the way it uses the most speculative of fantasies for thoughtful exploration, not just six-guns vs. laser shooters. Perhaps “respectful” is a more appropriate term. Without any snarkiness or irony it shows us the way that frontiersmen a decade after the Civil War would rise to the challenge of an alien invasion the same way they battled nature and each other, making up in determination for what they lacked in knowledge and technology.

As co-star Brendan Wayne explained to me in an interview, we can’t make the kinds of iconic John Ford films his grandfather, John Wayne starred in because “you can’t really do cowboys and Indians without insulting history and culture.” But a fight against aliens doesn’t require any nuance or sensitivity and that makes it possible to revisit the archetypes that continue to define us as a culture in a way that is both traditional and new.

As for plot, the title says it all. A cowboy (Daniel Craig) wakes up with amnesia. He does not know who he is, where he got the injury to his abdomen, or how a strange metal cuff became attached to his arm. We learn at the same time he does that his fighting skills are excellent and he has no compunction about killing — or relieving his victim of his boots, guns, and horse. And he has eyes the color of the clear sky over the Rockies.

“What do you know?” asks the preacher (Clancy Brown) who discovers the gunman has broken into his home “English,” says the gunman. He seems to know how to survive, or at least how to recognize danger and the vulnerability of those who intend to attack him.

The preacher lives in a town where the hot-headed and arrogant son of the local rancher accidentally shoots a deputy sheriff. He and the gunman are jailed waiting for federal marshalls — or for the young man’s father. One way or the other, they will leave the jail that night.

The father, Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) arrives, determined to take his son home. The marshalls arrive to take him to federal court. And then the aliens arrive and even in this land where nothing is certain and no rules seem to apply, this is so far out of their experience they can only call the invaders “demons.”

This middle section is the most intriguing. The cowboys can’t go to Google or watch old movies to figure out what to do. They don’t have electricity or automatic weapons. They have to figure out a way to fight their demons using only the same qualities and resources they bring to staking their claim on the land.

They know how to track their prey. And Dolarhyde was a Colonel at Antietem. That means he knows military tactics. And what it means to lose his men. The gunman’s memory begins to return and they get help from some unexpected sources in time for a final battle. The film falls apart a bit here and the long list of writers and producers (including Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard) may have been a factor in a disappointing last act that shows evidence of compromise and lack of focus. The aliens themselves also seem under-imagined and the reveal of their ultimate purpose caused some laughter in the theater.

Director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) likes to avoid CGI whenever possible, and he makes superb use of both the mechanical effects and the Western landscape. The faces of Ford and Craig are a landscape of their own and both men provide heft and a sense of resolute determination that resonates with our deepest myths and reminds us why so many of them include cowboys.

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The Smurfs

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 9:58 am

After a promising beginning with the tart but sweet romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” director Raja Gosnell has been mired in the quagmire of movie junk food, “family” movies like “Scooby-Doo” and “Yours, Mine and Ours.” They are the cinematic equivalent of high sugar, high fat processed food: loud, crude, special-effects-driven, cheesy, and vacuous. His updates miss both the charm and the point of the originals. While the animated “My Little Pony” is not only back on television but it is suddenly hip, this latest version of the Smurfs combines an enchanted world of magical animated characters with live-action New York City and manages to get the worst of both worlds. It tries to appeal to kids with pratfalls, potty humor, and the substitution of “Smurf” for every possible noun, verb, and adjective. It tries to appeal to adults with pointless cameos by Tim Gunn and Joan Rivers. Gunn looks around with the disappointed expression he usually reserves for those Project Runway contestants who are an hour from deadline without an idea and Rivers delivers her one line as if she is hoping her face will look as lively as the expressions of the animated characters. It doesn’t.

The Smurfs were created by Belgian comic artist Peyo (Pierre Culliford), who came up with the idea after he and a friend joked around by substituting nonsense syllables for the words in a conversation. He created a community of magical blue creatures “three apples high” called Smurfs who have adventures, fight off the evil wizard Gargamel, and say things like “Oh my Smurf!” “Smurf-zactly!” and, heaven help us, “Smurf happens.” The film-makers are so proud of that last piece of wit they used it for the URL of the movie’s website.

Children enjoy the Smurfs because they are tiny, magical, sometimes mischievous but sweet, and able to defeat their foe, a human-sized wizard named Gargamel. Kids like being able to predict what each Smurf will do, not too challenging because each one’s name, Seven Dwarf-style reflecting his sole characteristic. (The only female Smurf is called Smurfette, because being female is all you need to know about her.) Children learn what it means to be “Greedy,” “Grouchy,” “Vain,” or “Clumsy,” from the characters with those names. And listening to the way the word “Smurf” is used in the dialog is a good introduction to the way language works.

This film takes six of the Smurfs out of their animated community, with its quaint mushroom houses and soft pastel colors. Grouchy (George Lopez), Brainy (“SNL’s” Fred Armisen), Clumsy (Anton Yelchin), the inexplicably Scottish Gutsy (Alan Cummings), Smurfette (the endearingly candy-sparkle voice of pop star Katy Perry), and elder statesman Papa Smurf (Jonathan Winters) are chased by Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and his cat Azrael, who want their magical blue essence. They are all sucked through a portal that lands them in live action Central Park.

Before they can find a way to get back home, they encounter a harried marketing executive (Neil Patrick Harris) and his pregnant wife (“Glee’s” Jayma Mays), toy store F.A.O. Schwartz, an apartment, an office, a prison yard, and many, many unfunny attempts at comedy about the words “blue” and “Smurf.” Also, in a plot twist apparently lifted from every single episode of the last two seasons of “Bewitched,” the Smurfs mess up their new friend’s advertising campaign for his imperious boss (“Modern Family” bombshell Sofia Vergara) but of course somehow it turns out for the best.

The kids in the audience enjoyed the pratfalls, laughing uproariously when Gargamel got hit by a bus, and happily squealing at the gross-out humor from a disgusting hairball, a smelly port-a-potty, and a chamber pot in the middle of an elegant restaurant. They liked seeing Harris get down with the Smurfs for a rousing round of “Rock Band.” It is good to see Smurfette get a chance to show her fighting spirit, though not so good to see her stuck with a plot line about wanting new dresses, and downright disappointing to see her have to stand on a heating vent in one of them for a Marilyn Monroe joke. This must be why Gutsy is Scottish – so his kilt can billow up when he stands on the vent, too.

The movie wants us to feel affection for the Smurfs and make fun of them, too. It is is raw and mean-spirited, with too many of the “Smurf” word substitutions more naughty than nice (“Who Smurfed?” “Where the Smurf are we?”). That’s Smurfed up.

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