Skeeter (Emma Stone) is a self-possessed white woman in 1964 who just graduated from Ole Miss and has just gotten a job at the Jackson daily newspaper. She goes to her bridge club where she sees all the white girls she went to high school with (and apparently, even though Oxford and Jackson are only a few hours apart, she hasn't seen them for four years, or something). They are all dominated by the ginger hell-bitch Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose power comes from her deep faith in segregation and her own whitedom (actually, it's a total mystery why she's the boss as her mother, played wonderfully by Sissy Spacek, seems much more liberal and less bossy than she is).
The intrigue begins with Hilly needing to relieve herself, but refusing to do so because Elizabeth, in whose house they're playing, lets her black maid use the toilets rather than having them go outside. This is an affront to Hilly and her asscheeks and she insists that Elizabeth shape up.
As this hubbub is going on, Skeeter, who, Jesuslike, is the only White woman to care about the Black maids, notices that Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) are listening and feeling bad. They don't think their backsides are disgusting and neither does Skeeter (and neither do we, goddammit!).
In need of a story that she can write "from her heart" (let's begin the list of terrible misogynistic cliches that the film highlights rather than criticizes) for her cartoonish New York book publisher, Skeeter arranges with Aibileen and Minny to have them tell her their "stories" about looking after Whitefolk so she can write a book... by which, of course, she's really just going to transcribe (secret: transcription is not the same as writing non-fiction, Miss Skeeter). Skeeter wants to "shake up" the precious Southern society she lives in... though we never really know what drives her (aside from that "she went to college").
Pier Paolo Pasolini used shit and piss a lot in his masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. For him it was a symbol of bourgeois tastes, of cultural fascism and of the decline of a great Western tradition. He saw the controlling of a person's basic bodily functions as the most debasing thing one could do to another.
Writer/director Tate Taylor seems interested here in the control part of this equation, but only in the most banal terms. For him, this is a symbol of blind racism, of how white people in this era had crazy notions of safety based on bigotry and how dehumanizing it was for these black maids. Pretty understandable.
But that is possibly the most superficial readings of the Jim Crow South I've ever seen. Black people had their feelings hurt by mean white people? That's insulting. Almost no time is spent discussing lynchings, segregation, terrible living situations for blacks, pay inequalities or racially bigoted laws. Looking at a very basic timeline, one sees that James Meredith entered as a student at Ole Miss when Skeeter was a junior in 1962, so she might have had something to say about her bigoted colleagues at school who harassed him. But no.
It's never really clear that Skeeter is the instigator that she's meant to be. She certainly has a beef with Hilly who she sees as insensitive and overbearing, and clearly has a desire to tell the stories of all the black maids, though that's also personally motivated. She never makes any speeches or comments about how the segregation system is wrong-minded and basically goes with the flow more as a prankster than a revolutionary.
Our hearts are supposed to be warmed by Hilly getting her just desserts (so to speak), but she really only gets embarrassed in our eyes, those of the black maids and a few white women. She still wields tremendous power by the end and her dark ways continue (as does segregation and bigotry in Jackson). There's a weird non-ending to this film, where basically nothing happens and nothing changes. Here we get a re-heated tale of subterfuge and good and evil, but nothing really happens. Black maids continue to get paid pennies for their work, continue to have to use the toilets in the back yards of their employers' homes, continue to live in a world that hates them.
Worse than anything else, the shit and piss here really comes back in act three to be merely a punch-line. So much for racial equality and human decency. But that's really all this film is. This is not a movie about the fight to end racism (like In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or even Remember the Titans). This is a movie that uses the era of major changes in Civil Rights understanding and legislation merely as the wallpaper for telling a "women's story" about women who work (black women) and women who don't work (white women). This would be an interesting Marxist parable, but it's not even that. It's a knitting-circle story that asks few questions and requires even less understanding.
The main lesson here is "all shit stinks the same" - and this film certainly is that.
Stars: 1 of 4
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