The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

The Help (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (69)

The Help is a film about piss and shit. One might think that it's a story about empowered women, racism in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, mean-girl bullying or the humanity in every human, but it's really about scatology and urology. At our cores are not good souls that deserve racial and gender equality, rather we are all vessels for our next bowel movement. At least that's what I learned from The Help.

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