THE HELP – “What Went Wrong”

The Help – Tate Taylor, director, 2011

JOHN: The first half made me sick to my stomach. Even though I lived during the period depicted in the film, I didn’t know that the help in Southern homes were required to use separate bathrooms (of course I did know public facilities were segregated). What were people thinking. And the women dressed like mannequins, what was that all about (what would Freud have made of them and their treatment of women of a different color). We must never forget, even if it is difficult to watch.

GO, GO, GO (3 GOs out of 4)

SPANKY: I agree about the beginning, but the second half of the movie turns this into a Lifetime Channel feature, with that soupy music and its pointing a finger at the especially contemptible women, which sort of lets the white audience off the hook. The “poop pie” is a nice ironic twist, but having the “Help” book be well received and the black maid going off at the end to be a writer like the white girl—all seem self-serving to make the early message more palatable for today’s viewers.

BARK (1 BARK out of 4)

DOUBT – What Went Wrong?

DOUBT, John Patrick Shanley, Director, 2008 

HOOK: Memories we block out—like grade school.

Let the witch hunt begin.

LINE:  “I’m not initiating a guessing game here.”

SINKER: I bet those kids will be reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible next year. 

JOHN: I don’t remember the movie cameras being there but this is my grade school, Sister Aloysius is the nun I had in sixth grade and, yes, that bratty kid in the last seat drawing cartoons is me. This film has some of the finest performances by a cast ever. It captures a time most of us don’t want to remember and gives it new significance. Yet, it seems to go horribly wrong in the end. Oh, I don’t mean Meryl Streep’s sleeping with Philip Seymore Hoffman’ Father Flynn (just kidding) I mean the wrap-up at the end between the older sister and the younger one, Amy Adams. It follows the opening sermon of the movie (that doubt brings people together) but somehow it blows the entire film’s credibility. I felt like reaching over and slapping the mean nun on the back of the head and mouthing, “shut up,” just like she does to the young children talking in church at the beginning of the film. A definite flaw in the diamond, but a diamond nevertheless.

 GO GO GO GO (4 GOS out of four)

 SPANKY: I find it interesting that guys your age—successful guys, that is, like Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas—when they’ve gained a position of power use it to aggrandize their escapist fantasies (like your cartoons drawn in the back of the room), instead of examining, as this film does, why they want to escape. One possibility for the failure of the ending might be that Streep is too good (the scenes between her and Hoffman are electric, and Viola Davis hits her 15 minutes of fame out of the park). We can’t accept that there is more to Sister Aloysius Beauvier than that smug, self-righteous head slapper. But, I’m going to go with a different guess. I think there’s a foreshadowing scene missing between Streep and the old nun, who is going blind, that would show that this authoritarian figure is also afraid of being shipped out to clerical pasture. There she might have to confront herself. Amy Adams is a kind of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The pivotal point should be in her realization that the Wicked Witch of the West’s is fallible, not in Streep’s own implausible admission. That’s a mistake I want to avoid when I make my movie, “Hump.”

“TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four)

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