REVIEWS
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reviews
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Just in time for awards season (or slightly after) we bring you some film inspired reviews!
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THE HELP
(2011),
DIRECTOR: TATE TAYLOR STARRING: VIOLA DAVIS, EMMA STONE, OCTAVIA SPENCER
reviewed by Escher Walcott An Important Story Successfully Told Through Film
The Help - a film based on the 2009 novel by Mississippi native Kathryn Stockett – finally came to UK screens at the end of October 2011. I was able to see the film after months of waiting and I am so grateful I did. The film truly moves you and stays with you long after the credits have finished, thanks to not only the heartbreaking story created by Kathryn Stockett, but the sincere acting from the well assembled cast. Most notably, American actress Viola Davis who portrays the character Aibileen, the first household maid ‘Skeeter’, a young white female budding journalist, talks to when she decides to write a journal from the perspective of ‘the help’. Davis displays the heavy heartache and pain she has experienced over the years while working as she builds bonds with the white children she raises and then is forced to break these bonds as she moves onto another job, all the while losing precious time to raise her own son, so effectively with the subtlest gesture of just a slow longing glance or bow of the head. This woman is a seriously great actress and no doubt deserves an Oscar next year for truly bringing Stockett’s literary protagonist to life with such emotional depth. The film is at first, driven by Skeeter’s story (portrayed by young American actress Emma Stone), a white woman wanting to get ahead in times of repression, not only for African-Americans, but for women in general. Her character represents the headstrong, independent ‘radical’ woman of the early 60s who refused to be confined to the social regulations of becoming a housewife. She finds herself a job writing and is encouraged to find out about the world, letting others know what she discovers - she is brave in deciding to find out the truth about the real world including those suffering in it the most - black people. Now some may complain that as is the situation in books, Hollywood are using white actresses to portray a story that is supposed to be told from the perspective of black people. However although this is a serious subject in terms of movie-making where black actress are still not being put forward for roles other than those concerned with race, I believe for this story it is appropriate and realistic in the sense that, although they were working on it with the forces of
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REVIEWS Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, black people had no social power during the 50s and 60s and so in order to improve their situation they needed to have help from not only other people of the same cultural group but those in power - white people. Emma Stone is a great talent who displays a strong likeability in Skeeter’s character which is important in allowing the audience to connect with her and understand what she is trying to achieve through her writing. She wants to know the thoughts and feelings of those who she and so many other white women of her time were raised by. Who shaped her into the person she had become? The film starts out as Skeeter’s story but only briefly as the reality of the housemaids becomes the main focus as it should be. Octavia Spencer, who plays Aibileen’s confrontational friend Minny, also deserves an Oscar nomination for portraying the strength and bravery in her sassiness towards the rude families that hire her and in trying to save herself and her kids from her abusive husband. Her struggle to repress her vulnerability at times was perfectly executed. A mention is also deserved to the supporting cast, ditzy blonde Celia Foote played by Jessica Chastain is a warm character outcasted by the rest of her neighbourhood as they believe her a cuckqean, and so forms a close friendship with Minny who works for her. Bryce Dallas Howard is also scarily convincing as the evil Hilly Holbrook, who is intent on making the lives of her housemaids hell. This film has brought in wide audiences as although it contains the serious issues and experiences suffered by African-American housemaids, it also includes some lighter, funny moments showing that as hard as life can be there are times that pull you through. This is a story that needs to be told and it is done excellently through this film adaptation. When I went to the cinema I was glad to see that there were all types of ages and cultures of people watching the film and so hopefully people will understand the experiences of black women during these times slightly better. I can’t wait to read the book!
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REVIEWS
CARNAGE
(2012),
DIRECTOR: ROMAN POLANSKI STARRING: KATE WINSLET, JOHN C. REILLY, JODIE FOSTER, CHRISTOPHER WALTZ
reviewed by Helena Goodrich One day, Mr and Mrs Longstreet invited Mr and Mrs Cowan to their flat for coffee and a polite chat. You see, the Cowan’s son Zachary has viciously attacked the Longstreet’s son Ethan with a stick, causing injury and knocking out two of his teeth. The initial dialogue between the couples is the mundane small talk, verging on the painfully polite, that you would expect from respectable Americans. The Longstreets are determined to appear forgiving and host-like to their guests, and the Cowans are initially nothing but apologetic. Michael Longstreet (John C. Reilly) is particularly zealous in his attentions to his guests, insisting on feeding them the remains of an apple cobbler made by his lovely wife. The cobbler literally makes Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet) sick in a gloriously graphic scene; from underneath the surface layer of sickly sweet, sugar coated politeness, the visceral unpleasantness begins to emerge. Words, like vomit, cannot be taken back and the result is messy and unpleasant. Although Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), the stereotypically obsessive housewife tries to cover up the smell of Nancy’s vomit with eau de cologne and return to polite behaviour, the initial damage has been done and the characters begin to reveal what they really think about one another. The obvious middle class solution to an awkward situation is to get very drunk on expensive liquor; as the alcohol takes effect, the characters all become more absurd. Alan Cowan (Christopher Waltz) is the obnoxious, workaholic, corporate lawyer, answering his phone every couple of minutes, often mid- conversation, to everybody’s annoyance. These interrupting dialogues, of which we only hear Alan’s side, provide a dark sub-plot around corrupt capitalism which could have been developed further. His wife eventually drops his phone in the vase of water in a fit of pique, one of many examples of petty destruction. Foster screeches ‘I DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOUR AND I DON’T WANT ONE’, the veins in her face twitching with rage; the gormless looking Reilly alternates between mild mannered acceptance and hysterical anger and Winslet pouts childishly, trying to get her husband’s attention. The carefully engineered escalation of the quarrel and the way in which characters form and shed allegiances, each fighting to upstage one another is the film’s main selling point. However, we are too used to films in which people behave despicably towards one another
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REVIEWS and somehow the vision of Kate Winslet smashing tulips on the coffee table wasn’t enough to satisfy my desire for violence from Alan Cowan’s ‘god of carnage’. The film never strays too far from the comic, portraying the absurdity of the middle class when trying to behave badly. Yasmina Reza’s well paced dialogue, as you would expect from what was originally a play- script, trots along merrily providing both moments of hilarity and toe clenching awkwardness and Polanski skilfully develops a claustrophobic interior within which the squabble can unfold; the Cowan’s are free to leave at any time but elect to remain and continue the battle to the bitter end. Not one to watch with boyfriends or lovers.
A PERSONAL RESPONSE TO 3D AND BEYOND by Caroline Guo The snowflakes dotting the Parisian cityscape drift off the screen towards my eyes but never manage to touch me—instead, I’m safely hidden, nice and warm, behind the awkward shield of those unwieldy, £1 glasses that bring such 3D movie images to life. While exposing me to the pop-up images (the Police Inspector/Sacha Baron Cohen’s angry face stretches ominously towards mine; his doberman’s muzzle aggressively confronts me), they simultaneously shelter me from any real sense of touch or confrontation, disguised and anonymous as one out of many others covered by the darkness (and those awful glasses!) of the movie theater. Recently, while watching Martin Scorsese’s Hugo 3D (2011), the three-dimensionality of the snow, the Inspector, the dog, and more not only struck me with their spectacular qualities but also by a certain uneasiness that I experienced when finding myself face to face with them. After all, those faces and sights projected in movie theaters have always been amplified several times their actual size…but these are, somehow, larger than large—they burst out towards me whilst I have nowhere to go; they occupy that no-man’s land usually standing between me and the screen; and they threaten the wholeness of my vision (poke my eye!) with their oft-gimmicky protrusions. So the snow globe cracks—the glass shatters, releasing the normally flat images from the confinement of their onscreen worlds to float towards (invade?) me, to the point where I no longer know where they end and I begin, or where they begin and I end. The image + me, or me + the image, meld to form one inseparable mess (or mass?). But it’s those edges, the edges of the screen: that’s where the magic ends, the technology fails, and the snow and the Inspector and the dog are finally pinned down to their world, reassuring me that, don’t panic, this is just an illusion. I remember the horror I felt, around the age of 10, when I saw my first 3D film in Orlando, Florida’s Disneyworld during a showing of Honey I Shrunk the Audience (a spin-off of the 1989 film Honey I Shrunk the Kids), held captive by (the sight of)
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REVIEWS a slithering snake about to sink his venomous fangs into me and a cat threatening to unleash his claws and gouge my eyes out. This wasn’t the way I planned to go—not at the mercy of the fangs or the claws of these enlarged, fictional creatures. So I did the only sensible thing left to do: I threw off my glasses, giving up my (parent’s) money’s worth and watching the rest of the film in its blurry 2D form, but, in the end, watching it as I thought movies had always and should always be seen: flat and far away. Perhaps, though, it won’t be such a faraway future when 3D begins to encroach on our daily lives and our private space—the format could prove to be a passing fad, but all I can wonder is how long it’ll be before screens and such images will stretch across all 4 sides of the wall…what would it be like, then, as we’re gradually smothered from all sides? Or would we welcome the changes with unquestioning content, choosing to surround ourselves with holographic images and digital ghosts instead of flesh and blood humans simply because it feels, strangely, safer? After all, even outside the movie theater, we’re already under an incessant fire of moving images: I often think back to Ray Bradbury’s dystopian picture of the future in his novel Fahrenheit 451, with the ubiquitous screens lining the homes and constant media stimulation pounded into the characters’ heads. Yet isn’t that what we’re starting to resemble, with our ears stuffed with headphones and eyes pulled towards screens? Going up and down those escalators in the London tube, there are certain ones lined with the same moving advertisement, so that one, two, three—I fall into a trance of monotony, visually hammered on the head by the same sight and the same message over and over again. And, perhaps, there could be that day where those commercials detach themselves from the walls and reach out towards me, grabbing me by the collar instead of just by my eyes... Funnily, though, the world is already naturally presented in 3D, which begs the question of why we’re in fact just trying to imitate and represent what’s already there. But as Alex DeLarge declares in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971): “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” Maybe, then, the issue is that we can’t even manage to believe in our own, all-too-real threedimensionality until the technique of representing such physical and visual fullness is perfected on our movie screens and TV sets. So it may just be a matter of time before those advertised products come popping forth to inundate me with their commercial messages; before the commodity + me and me + commodity meld together (or have already melded together?) to form an indistinguishable mess-mass; and before I voluntarily forego the sensation of fresh, cold snow between my fingers to gaze at the digitized flurry instead.
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