Home

Once Upon a Time in Mississippi

08.09.11

The hullabaloo over The Help this summer was impossible to miss, and just as absurd. The bestselling novel was itself a chick-lit sop endeavoring to explore race relations in early-’60s Mississippi, but it has nothing on the film, which ramps up every cute, convenient and absurdly feel-good reflex into a Ron Howard-esque froth. No one has been surprised by the film’s slack middle-class sentimentality, but some observers were apparently taken aback—enough so to fill Sunday newspaper think-piece columns, in any case—by the focus on a white heroine (played by cartoon-eyed, alabaster-cheeked Emma Stone) in a film taking on Southern bigotry in the civil-rights era.

Seriously? In the pundits’ defense, it was a terribly slow movie summer, with plenty of cheap ink expended on predictable sequels and superheroes. But the appearance of The Help felt like a symptom of national amnesia, just as much for the reaction to its historical intent (much of the cant seemed shocked, shocked, by the very idea of the South’s once-endemic caste system) as for its Caucasian-centric scenario.

Source: In These Times