JFK

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 

 

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

At the time of this film's release, Stone's movie-collage of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories was more than controversial, it was inflammatory. Experts in "the field" criticized it for playing fast and loose with facts and some went so far as to call it dangerous in its implications. There was so much flummery going on, some of which contradicted other speculations of the film, that it was considered a new form of propaganda, where new possibilities popped up before previous assertions were followed up on, that one was simply overwhelmed with the slew of speculations so that, finally, nothing was ever concluded. There were no answers, merely a mountain of questions, all of them vague and unsubstantiated. Stone was merely throwing stuff up at the screen and seeing if anything stuck.

Stone answered these charges by saying that he was making a new kind of film, and that he was trying to build a new narrative for the Kennedy assassination, not provide a definitive answer, but to ask questions, merely. The evidence of film bears it out—at least at first glance—as it's so filled with theories and goes down so many rabbit-holes, unchecked and unverified (Stone has stated he was using the films Rashomon and Z as his models). But, one only has to see how Stone starts the movie to know where he thinks the center of the conspiracy lies. After that quote by author and spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox, he introduces Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower's final address as President, in which he warns of "the military-industrial complex". Like so many openings of so many movies, it is the director's thesis statement, providing that one bit of detail before launching into a history of Kennedy's recent history (narrated by Martin Sheen, who has played both John and Robert Kennedy in the past).

"I'm ashamed to be an American today."

The film proper begins the day of Kennedy's assassination as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner, who had, in 1998's Bull Durham, delivered a speech in which his character states "I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.") sees the assassination coverage on television initially in his office, then watches mournfully from a nearby bar where the local booze-hounds are free to weep in their beers or grunt their approval of the President's death. At the same point he cuts away to an argument between two men in the bar, New Orleans private detective Guy Bannister (Edward Asner) and an operative Jack Wheeler (Jack Lemmon),* which leads to a fight in Bannister's office when Martin brings up past suspicious activity. Meanwhile, Garrison starts looking into local links to the assassination and brings in pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), who might have had links with Oswald. And despite Ferrie being sketchy and giving conflicting stories, they let him go.

"It's all broken down, spread around, you read it and the point gets lost."

It is only after the Warren Commission Report on the assassination is released that Garrison picks up the threads of the case again. A chance airplane encounter with a Senator (Walter Matthau), whose skepticism —"That dog don't hunt!"—about the report sparks Garrison to again call in Ferrie, but also Martin, who had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in Bannister's office and follow up leads not explored after the initial inquiry was dropped. One name keeps popping up—"Clay Bertrand" but nobody knows who that is. Turns out that "Bertrand" is an alias of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), well known in New Orleans business circles as a wealthy benefactor and who had connections with Ferrie and thus Oswald. Garrison and his team have Shaw picked up for arrest despite their inquiries producing only denials.

 

"Oh, you are so naive"

 

One aspect of the film that is both a high achievement and problematic is the way that it mixes archive footage with deftly re-created new footage in such a way that it is nearly impossible to determine one from the other. Stone and his cinematographer, the wizardly Robert Richardson, mix and match formats, color and black-and-white, 35mm and 16mm, and all sorts of film stocks to create and re-create source footage and the results are nearly indistinguishable, especially the way they are cross-cut between each other. It lends the air of verisimilitude—and certainly adds a dynamic tension between the transitions—but one is never sure if one should believe what one is seeing. Is that press footage from the day of the shooting or is Stone just fabricating something he wants you to see?

It's troubling. There's a fine line between making it look right and obfuscation and given that film, by its very nature, is manipulative—even with documentaries—the level of distrust this attention to detail evokes is extremely high. What are we to believe? The answer is whatever the director wants you to believe. And given Richardson's deserving Oscar-winning work on this film to match the look, the grain and the confusion of archive footage, some of which might even be familiar, distinguishing the true from forgery is almost impossible. And audiences become susceptible.

One should always be aware that it's a fictional film of real-life events. And rather than speaking truth, it can only come up with conjecture.

 

"And the truth is on your side, bubba."

 

Stone makes his own case on what happened in a middle sequence where Garrison goes to Washington D.C. to meet an informant, a former military official who only identifies himself as "X" (Donald Sutherland, who's brilliant in a role of pure exposition). That Garrison would fly to D.C. to meet an anonymous source strains credulity (he surely must know his name before agreeing to meet, but then, the reality is Garrison never met this character, communicating with him in un-cinematic exchanges of letters).

It is 'X''s contention that Kennedy was making feasibility studies for withdrawing troops from Vietnam—"X" was doing the inquiries—and that this rattled the cages of the Pentagon and the CIA. "X" is unexpectedly assigned to...Antarctica...and only learns of the assassination the next day when he reads a New Zealand newspaper that has a full run-down on Oswald as the assassin when he hadn't even been charged yet. To "X" this smacks of "black ops" work (which he also used to do). Oh, and did I mention that "X" was also part of Kennedy's security detail? "X" seems to have got around.

Anyway, by the end of his exposition, "X" has a conspiracy that could involve the Pentagon, "the military-industrial complex", FBI, CIA, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the Secret Service and Lyndon B. Johnson—he was in the fired-upon motorcade, after all—and all of them had grudges against Kennedy, but mostly, they didn't want to cease operations in Vietnam which was making a lot of people a lot of money. This is the same Vietnam War that Oliver Stone fought in from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry, which was a traumatic experience for him, and that he has made the subject of three of his films.

"X" refuses to come forward with this information and flat-out refuses to be a witness for Garrison's prosecution, but "X" tells him that his best chance is that he's the only guy conducting a trial involving the Kennedy assassination. "Your only chance," he says "is to come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shit-storm. Hope to start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government will crack." And, with those words of encouragement, he walks away, leaving Garrison hanging. Stone cuts to the Eternal Flame at Kennedy's grave. When Stone gets in trouble, he goes for sentimentality.

The film's last hour is that most deadly of momentum killers, a trial, with Exhibit A being a long speech by one character...in this case Garrison.* That speech wouldn't stand in a court of law and it isn't made clear if it's a closing argument (that barely mentions the defendant Clay Shaw) or a part of Garrison's evidentiary overview (it starts with objections from the defense and then they are never heard from again), but Stone is dramatically stretching truth...and credulity...to make his point. And it goes on forever, like the stultifying final speech in court in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's only Stone's direction, Richardson's chameleon cinematography and Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia's quick-silver editing that keeps it interesting as film. And almost impossible to make counter-arguments against the assertions, they come so fast and furiously.

Stone's film ends with "what's past is prologue." Okay, so let's look at the past. All previous American political assassinations, successful or otherwise, before and after Kennedy's own, have been due to "lone gun-men" (or women). The most suspicious shooting is that of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And most damning of all, recent events have seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents questioning or ignoring, even humiliating their own intelligence or military agencies...but manage to remain very much alive. Kennedy was less of a threat...he merely wanted to wind down a war...as has been done recently...and Stone would have you think he was killed for it.

Yet, History doesn't bear that out. In fact, though they may rebel (or at least write a book), they don't assassinate. "That dog don't hunt."

Remember, "what's past is prologue."

But, the film did have an impact. 99% of the documents that were sealed after the assassination have been brought to light, particularly to the issues raised in the movie (The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed in 1992, the year after the movie's release). Although the stated goal of the act was to release all documents by October 2017, some still have not been released. Trump went back on a promise to release them pushing it back to when he was out of office, then Biden delayed them (COVID...for some reason) then released some in 2022 and 2023.** We're at 99% except for those that would cause "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure."

Same old excuse. "It'll keep us from doing our jobs" they say, even if those jobs have dramatically changed in 60 years. But, if JFK is worth anything, it is for its shaming of our government agencies' lack of transparency to commit them to act in that 1992 law. Six decades is two generations of secrets. Too many people and too many prominent people have expressed their doubts to not have as many answers as possible to wash away as many questions as possible.

Not that that will make a difference. We've reached the Age of Un-reason where nobody believes their own eyes anymore. If everything was released, unredacted and transparent, it is doubtful that the truth would be accepted...especially by those who make their livings as professional doubters and skeptics.

The true conspiracy has always been theirs. As in the mantra of All the President's Men, one merely has to "follow the money."

"It's up to you."

 

* The film is awash with cameo's and "guest-stars" in what Stone intended to be like the roster of The Longest Day, but it feels more like the many odd cameos in The Greatest Story Ever Told, that seem ill-though-out and are actually distracting and pull you right out of the movie. John Candy? 

** This is just part of Garrison's summation from the film:

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

*** Whether Trump will release any more documents in his next term one can only speculate. I don't believe a word the man says so even if he says he will, I'd be looking at updates on the website: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk

Get Low

Written at the time of the film's release...

"The Hell With It. The Hell With Me."

or
"An Old Nutter Attracts More..."

Twain coulda wrote this one: a hermit of 40 years makes his way into town to arrange his own funeral party (which he'd like to attend before it's required, thank you).

That Get Low, which tells the tale, is based on a true story only makes it that much more enjoyable, even if the film itself turns dark, just as Twain woulda spun it. It is, when all is said and done, about a funeral.

Frank Bush (Robert Duvall), who has lived apart from the Tennesee community, has developed a reputation as a "Boogie-Man"—for Duvall, this role is the push-back book-end to his "Boo" Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird—and gets it in his mind to arrange a "living funeral," where anyone who has a story to tell about him can and might.  For local funeral home director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), Bush's odd request is an opportunity to make a big score and arrange an ultimate funeral—whatever it takes, he'll do, even if the arrangements start to get a little bit out of his control. For Murray's Quinn, it's a movie-length warning of "It's your funeral..."

The poster above makes one think that it's a two hander, just Duvall and Murray, but this is an ensemble picture—a very meticulously cast one—with a lot of people, including Lucas Black, Sissy Spacek, Bill Cobbs and Gerald McRaney doing some of their most effective work in years. Spacek, in particular, is a marvel.  This isn't one of her "splashy" roles, and she's been purposely de-glammed to take the blossom off her ripe strawberry features, but she still manages to make every define her character by the simplest of gestures, or by the "social smile" under pained eyes. Bill Cobbs plays a prickly minister acquaintance of Bush's, and makes the maximum potential out of a small role—like Duvall used to in his early career—with innate comic timing and a sense of doomed inevitability. His laugh brings a smile to the face.  Murray does his best work in years. His Quinn is at heart an opportunist, but makes it look presentable (like any good funeral director!) with the look of feigned dignity and a melancholy elan.

But it's Duvall's picture—he's in most scenes—and one is tempted to call it Oscar-bait for the veteran character actor, as he hasn't had a role this big in years—the arc of the character turning from eccentric to tragic figure without betraying the characteristics on either end of the curve, displaying his capacity to create a living character, able to accomodate the trials and tones of the movie. Speaking in a voice like brittle rice paper, that flakes off bits of sentences at the end, his Bush is a courtly soul in need of definition. The old hermit, after spending 40 years in a self-imposed exile from the opinions of others, initially seeks their judgement, first as audience, and then as performer, seeking some ablution or absolution—a trial-run, if you will, in the court of public opinion, before being forced to succumb to the Final Judgement. It is confession and catharsis, timed with the death of one man, and the return of his widow to her home-town. Duvall's funeral speech is humble, contrite and confused, and the actor provides an amazing sonic counter-point to his recounting of the history that has dominated and colored his existence. His performance haunts, in the display of a haunted man.

Director Andrew Schneider, a previous Oscar winner for his short film work, manages to maintain a visual interest throughout the movie, observing events but never calling attention to itself observing. Characters are sometimes over-whelmed in the surroundings, and the scale of the film is sparingly in line with a small-town closeness. That the tone gradually shifts from quaint eccentricity to Southern Gothic is probably inevitable for a film that climaxes with a funeral, especially one that starts with humble beginnings and turns grandiose and complicated (in a movie turn towards melodrama that had nothing to do with the actual historical events of the real Felix Breazeale). But, without the added mystery, and "the story to tell," the film would have had no depth, and would have felt as shallow as a grave in a pet cemetery. The embellishments give the story added weight, and make the turns of events mean something, as opposed to just being an old man's fancy.

Well worth seeing.

The real Felix "Bush" Breazeale, attending his funeral in 1938.

Carrie On, My Wayward Daughter

King's Prom Queen

Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976) Director Brian DePalma ratcheted up to the top tier of film directors—from his independent-gadfly status—with his adaptation of Stephen King's teen horror story. It was the first film based on one of King's novels, "Carrie" being only King's second published book. Screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen did away with King's splintered narrative and made it more personal, treating it like some perverse After-school Special from Hell, showing the tortured existence of a repressed high school wall-flower—played at the time by 26 year-old Sissy Spacek—who, upon her late onset of puberty is given yet another curse—telekinesis, the ability to move objects with her mind...sometimes violently.

Sometimes very violently.

Some might consider it a gift as, after all, it levels the playing-field for this unpopular, shy girl when dealing with the teasing and bullying of her school-mates, a species of popularity that Carrie does not understand or even hope to attain.

The trouble is Carrie White (Spacek) is not mature enough to use it with any sort of tempered judgment. The very hormones coursing through her that have given her the power are also the ones that give her extremes of emotions that are only exacerbated by the social freedom and pressures that percolate and bubble and boil in the cauldron that is High School.

Carrie White, also, has a less-than-secure home-life. Her mother (played by Piper Laurie) is extremely religious to a near-demented degree. A single mother, her control over Carrie is close to a strangle-hold, and as tight a grip as she maintains, she cannot compete with her daughter's desire to fit in and her defiance, which completely unhinges her. Combine that with Carrie's newly-realized powers and her Mother begins to see her as a devil or witch. Certainly Godless.

Carrie's persecution by the more popular girls at Bates High School inspires Sue Snell (Amy Irving) to suggest to her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) that he take Carrie to the upcoming prom. He is VERY reluctant, but she manages to convince him On the other hand, if Sue has sympathy for Carrie, "Sosh" Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) has vengeful antipathy, for the way she's been punished over her bullying of Carrie. And rather than admit her role in it, doubles down on taking revenge on Carrie by sabotaging Sue's good intentions. Her actions, though, only guarantee that everything is going to go to hell, complete with the commensurate fire and brimstone, wiping out guilty and innocent alike.

De Palma had the advantage of some lucky casting—he conducted a joint casting call with George Lucas, who was looking for young actors for his upcoming "Star Wars" feature—and he also had the lucky break of getting Spacek (whom he knew as a set dresser for husband Jack Fisk, a production designer), as well as managing to coax Piper Laurie out of a self-imposed retirement (after winning an Oscar for The Hustler), as well as getting teen-heart-throb and cast-member of "Welcome Back Kotter", John Travolta. It's an amazing cast with large parts for Betty Buckley (who would win a "Tony" Award for "Cats") as well as newcomers Irving and Allen (both of whom would appear in other De Palma films).

By the time of filming, the iconoclastic De Palma had developed a huge respect for the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (his previous films, Sisters and Obsession, being whole-sale tributes to the Master of Suspense) and his work on Carrie has echoes of Hitchcock's architectural film-work throughout, even borrowing Bernard Herrmann's murder music from Psycho for a sound-accompaniment to Carrie's use of her powers (Herrmann was even set to score Carrie before his death). Certainly, frustratingly domineering mothers and religious iconography were appropriated from Hitch's work, as well as his way of building suspense.

Carrie remains one of the strongest films in De Palma's filmography, with its combination of the macabre, the tragic, and the mordantly humorous, lying just on the precipice of hysteria, which is where one's memories of High School usually lie.

De Palma moves from slo-motion suspense to split-screen mayhem at Carrie's prom.

Written at the time of the film's release...

To Carrie Out the Lord's Vengeance
or 
"Mama, Don't Ruin it!"

I've been working on a review of Brian De Palma's film Passion the last couple of weeks years (still working out how I feel about it—on a superficial enjoyment level it doesn't succeed very well, but if you appreciate craft and detail there is a lot to digest, and it makes you realize that a lot of older directors go through that shift where the details are more important than the Big Picture) and was watching an interview with De Palma* about the film (which I'll include again when I get around to finishing it) and at one point the subject of Kimberly Pierce making a new version of Carrie was broached.  

"We're friends", he said of Pierce, who made Boys Don't Cry and Stop-Loss. "I've seen some stuff and it looks good." But the more telling comment from the talk is when someone brings up Piper Laurie (who played mother Margaret White in his version) and De Palma remarks: "Piper thought we were making a comedy."

As well she might have. Stephen King's "Carrie" is a hoot to read (you can do so—textually—here), but it isn't if you take it too seriously. Which is odd. King cackles and galumphs through his writing, something he also did when he took to acting and directing his films. Which is why the best King adaptations have a surreal sense of giddy humor about them—they have to be a little over-the-edge, dangling their feet in the muddy waters of madness to be really, really good. It's why George Romero made good King adaptations. And Kubrick (despite King's protestations). And Carpenter. And Reiner. And De Palma.  But, if you get all solemn and reverential about them, they fall flat as pancakes.

Pierce gets precipitously close to that edge, but doesn't tumble over it. She includes a couple of things that De Palma, and the screenwriter of both versions—and the musical version—Lawrence D. Cohen, left out of King's book, which are the opening scene of Carrie's birth (the harrowing circumstances alluded to in the first chapter) and a sub-plot involving Sue Snell. Quite a few things are better—the kids...look like kids, not twenty-somethings from television sit-com's posing as teens. The good of that is that the performances are more awkward and more vulnerable. The downside is that they are all dewy lumps that don't have a lot of distinctiveness to them, so one is caught for a second wondering "which one is this, again?" I mock the ages of the older Carrie cast-members, but they had the experience and chops (from those sit-coms, presumably) to make their characters known as soon as they entered a shot. The 2013 kids are...awkward...looking like they're ready for a direction-cue in the middle of a take. For example, as pretty and competent as Gabriella Wilde is (she plays this version's Sue Snell, the "remorseful" girl played first by Amy Irving), most of the time she's blandly waiting for her next line with a concerned furrow and not much else behind it

One essential thing (given the times, making this Carrie somewhat relevant) is the inclusion of the evil genie of new media into the mix. Every kid here has a cell-phone. Every kid is documenting their lives like would-be film-makers (and Pierce throws in random samples of such stuff for bridging sequences, showing "normal" high school activity). But, the most innovative use of it comes when Carrie has a "period" in school that isn't scheduled and the girls in her high school gym class viciously taunt her, there's the added inevitability that some goonish lout will whip out their I-phone (usually banned from bathrooms for this very reason) to record the event. At that point, the truly bad-bad girl of Kris Hargenson (a brunetted Portia Doubleday here, future Mrs. de Palma Nancy Allen then) decides to go one step further, post it on YouTube, and it's then that punishment is meted out to the class. For Kris, this is unfair—she doesn't want to be an out-cast as she sees Carrie is and lashes out, digging herself deeper and deeper into detention, punishment and malicious revenge—and that video is used to twist the knife during the horrific prom sequence. It raises the stink of public media being thrown into the mix of private bullying and how it has escalated the trauma of humiliation by bringing mob mentality into the pecking order, empowering the mean-spirited far beyond their reach, and narrowing the victim of options for safe zones that might bring light (and perspective) to their situation. At that point, humiliation becomes torture and isolation becomes impenetrable.

As I said, if you take this stuff too seriously, it becomes no fun at all. And while Pierce's heart is in the right place, standing up for the repressed outcast and removing the puerile nudity of De Palma's version, she also goes a bit too far, making things less horror-ific, and more disturbingly real. For example, taking the loony ecstasy that Laurie brought to her fundamentalist (no fun; all mental) mother—Julianne Moore's version is seriously deranged, scratching herself to bleeding at the slightest provocation—and making Moretz's Carrie a very active revenge-seeker (where Spacek's interpretation was all evil-eye and mannequin-stiff, Moretz directs the carnage like a magician), the changes make her much less sympathetic as a character. Even though both movies show Carrie "learning her craft" by checking out resources in the library (I thought schools were banning books right and left—heck, they even ban "Carrie!"), the new Carrie seems to have more control than Spacek's, whose bursts of revenge felt like an id monster that would combust things with a look. This one concocts tortures and lingers over them like a cat playing with a mouse. Hey, control is great, but at what point does the tortured become the torturer? At what point do we lose sympathy for her and see her as just another maniac terrorizing a school? At what point does that earnestness work against the intent?

So. Good attempt. Maybe even worth the effort. But, at some point, this new Carrie manages to undermine the reason it was generated in the first place—to give us a really good scare. Perhaps real life events have just caught up and overwhelmed the perspective of seeing entertainment in this, or, to make debating points, the filmmakers just eked out some of that entertainment value. But, I remember leaving the first Carrie feeling sympathy for the devil, seeing it as a tragedy. This time, it seemed everything was a natural consequence of tinkering with forces beyond one's control, especially if self-control is in short supply. There was no catharsis, and at that point, Carrie 2.0 just stands for nothing, a nihilistic bloody mess. 

*

The Help (2011)

Written at the time of the film's release...

"The Other Side of the Bridge Club (Insuring Domestic Tranquility)"
or
"You Ought Not to Joke About the Colored Situation"

You go into The Help with a certain amount of trepidation.  Will it be so politically correct as to have no bite? Will it be a "TWGSTD" movie, where the true story of the oppresssed is supplanted by "the drama" of a privileged person's conscience to help? Will it be a Neapolitan "Chick-Flick," all sugary ice cream of different flavors and colors? We've seen plenty of those, and one would hope that we've evolved out of our tribalism enough that film-makers—even commercial film-makers—hedge their story by surrounding the center with white-washing vanilla.**

Stanley Kramer, after all, has been dead for ten years.

With The Help, it's a hesitant answer of "Yes" and "No." "Yes," the story has elements of "White Guilt" saves the day, but only in the short term, and said Guilty Party, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (known as "Long-Haul" to her high school friends for actually attending and graduating college and pursuing a journalism "job," rather than settling for domestic tranquility) may have a sense of accomplishment, but it costs her. And the issue of "You think you're gonna help us?" is very pointedly brought up by the character of Minny Jackson (played by her real-life inspiration, Octavia Spencer, in an excellent performance).  Say it, sister.. Nice touch of dignity, that. 

Young Miss "Skeeter" (Emma Stone), is ambitious, as are all the white women in the segregated community of Jackson, Mississippi; her ambitions don't center around who throws the nicest bridge club setting (or has it thrown for them), or making a name for herself preserving the traditions of The South. She wants to be a journalist, which, given the times, relegates her to ghosting a "best-bleach-for-the-sheets" column for the local newspaper. 

But, gnawing at her no. 2 pencil is what happened to the woman who raised her as a child. No, not mother Charlotte (Allison Janney, who tends to periodically rise above her material), but the house-servant, Constantine Jefferson (the always wonderful Cicely Tyson—I've missed her), who accepted and applauded her graceless duckling ways in a city of debu-taunting swans, and who disappeared while she was away at college, never to return. The vacancy of Constantine and her story inspires her to talk to the "help" about their stories, and how they maintain during their domestic servitude. Fearing a backlash from amongst the womens' society, she initially only gets to talk to a reluctant Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis, whose movie this is**), who tells her of her early days and of her family's molasses-like progress from house-"slaves" to house-"servants."

It involves the telling of tales on the pastel and flower-printed white woman she works for, a friend of "Skeeter's" (Anna Camp) and of the Red Queen of the Bridge set, Miss Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, a subtle, ethereal actress, allowed to go "broadly comic," which, as when Meryl Streep does it, is not pretty).*** 

Set about the time of the Medgar Evers murder, where any sort of racial consciousness-raising was cracked down upon by Jackson police and strict curfews enforced, The Help has a tendency to overlook the more serious event in the timeline of its narrative, veering more towards comedy in Tate Taylor's adaptation (Taylor is a lifelong friend of novelist Kathryn Stockett's and acquired the rights to her novel before publication), but there is enough genuine tension in scenes of servants trying to get home by curfew, that the plight of the women in the serving class, and the genuine danger they faced in up-braiding their employers, and the structure imposed on them, simmers under the surface.  

Even in the face of somewhat trivially humiliating comeuppance, any sense of triumphant table-turning seems negligible against the long road to some sense of justice, however piddling (though entertainingly apt to provide a shit-eating grin) those small victories might be. 

As such, The Help, like those small victories, is a measured success.

(And I appreciated the handy list of uses for Crisco).

* "The White Guy Saves The Day," ala "Robinson Crusoe," Dances with Wolves, Glory, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Mississippi Burning, The Last Samurai, Avatar, heck, even "Transformers"...

** The closest it comes to teetering over the edge is in a sub-plot of an ostracized Southern belle from the other side of the tracks (played by Jessica Chastain), who embodies a white version of Southern social stigma, and, in a reverse of the normal Hollywood strategy of "white moves first," is shown "the ropes" by one of "the help," an act that becomes mutually beneficial.

*** Octavia Spencer is a real "find" here and a shoo-in to get a Best Supporting Actress nomination come Oscar season, but I hope that Academy voters will also give a Best Actress nod to Davis, whose tremulous fire in her role would make it her second nomination in three years—her first being Doubt, in which her one-speech scene managed to outshine Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

**** As if this embarrassment of acting riches wasn't enough, Miss Hilly's mother is played by Sissy Spacek, who continues to play ordinary roles in a most extraordinary way.

*+