Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/14/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, February 14, 2025

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

Viola Davis in The Help

Cast: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Ahna O'Reilly, Alison Janney, Cicely Tyson, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, David Oyelowo. Screenplay: Tate Taylor, based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett. Cinematography: Stephen Goldblatt. Production design: Mark Ricker. Film editing: Hughes Winborn. Music: Thomas Newman.

The Help is Gone With the Wind for white liberals, as a line in the film suggests. Glossy and superficial, its treatment of race and class annoyed me, though not quite as much or as deservedly so as it annoyed its star, Viola Davis, who has expressed her regret that she appeared in the movie. I lived through the time and pretty much in the place it depicts, and while I can vouch for the accuracy of much of its portrayal of the racial and social attitudes in the movie, it's the point of view that brings the movie crashing down into mediocrity and irrelevance. Both the writer-director Tate Taylor and the novelist Kathryn Stockett, whose work he adapted, were born in Jackson, Miss., in 1969, too late and too white to give a more informed and nuanced look at the subject they treat. While their hearts and minds are in the right place, they rely on tired tropes like the Magical Negro and the White Savior to tell their story. The result is a soothing reassurance that all of this took place in the past and things are not as they were as far as racism in America is concerned, an attitude at odds with every day's headlines.