The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The Help takes the obliviousness of Kathryn Stockett's 2009 hit novel and magnifies it to the level of the dangerously ignorant. The novel at least had the decency to include a modicum of ambiguity and the suggestion that Stockett could vaguely remember some of her 3rd-grade social studies lessons on the Civil Rights Era. The film, on the other hand, is erected out of pure fantasy, set in a plastic, pastel Jackson, Miss. that has all the authenticity of Lars von Trier's Dogville set. Stockett's novel dropped whiffs of the true reality of 1960s Jackson among her dialect-ridden, charmed view of social prejudice like talismans to ward off criticism, but childhood friend Tate Taylor has to condense 500 pages into two-and-a-half hours. Given the paper-thin characterization of the novel's figures, this means that the obliterated subplots and truncated, blunt dialogue serve to make the material even more farcical.

In fairness, Taylor does try to refashion Stockett's book around the African-American characters instead of a white guilt cipher. But this idea goes no farther than letting Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a maid who becomes the first to tell her stories of life serving whites, narrate the movie. Soon enough, focus is back on Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent college grad and sort-of feminist who, despite no clear identity before leaving for school and a blindness to current events (at least in the book), decides to get the black perspective of Jackson life. In the novel, Skeeter is almost jaw-droppingly entitled and never criticized for it. Here, Taylor dispenses with nearly all of her story, which would be a significant improvement if he also cut down her screen time to match. But no, regardless of who had to go in to record ADR, this is still Skeeter's story.

Brian De Palma: Carrie

Stories about young men seeking to enter "adulthood" are a dime a dozen, but the field of girls-becoming-women movies is notably less fertile. Perhaps it's because males consider themselves men when they shove themselves up a birth canal -- which raises all sorts of questions -- but womanhood gets defined through puberty as there is one facet of biological change that becomes immediately noticeable, and it's something no man ever wants to talk about. Even I stop dead in my tracks when any one of woman friends uses the phrase "on the rag" with such horrifying frankness that I get the urge to enlist in the military just so I can one day speak so casually of bleeding for an extended period of time.

Brian De Palma keenly understands how badly every man going into the theater never wants to think about menstruation, and he stages one of the funniest visual gags in the history of cinema right in the opening credits. After a short establishing scene of young women in a high school gym class, De Palma cuts to a slow-motion shot of these nubile teens in various states of undress, playfully teasing each other as the camera moves through them, finally settling on one girl, Carrie (Sissy Spacek). De Palma cuts to close-ups of Carrie as she rubs soap over her body, letting water slowly cascade off her legs, down her neck to her stomach. Then she moves to wash genitals, and she comes back with a bloody hand. In an instant, De Palma flips the male gaze and causes all the men in the audience who were a half step away from getting off and terrifies them.

Carrie, too, is terrified, and the ingenious comedy of the moment gives way to concern for a young woman who was never told about this fact of life, reacting to her first period, well, the way any man would if he noticed blood coming out of his penis: she screams in terror and begs for help. The other teenagers, having already had their first periods and, more importantly, known about them before they even got them, mock her. The group, led by Chris (Nancy Allen), pelt the poor girl with tampons and shout, "Plug it up!" until the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) finally intervenes, but by then Carrie is so worked up that Miss Collins has to slap her to get the woman to stop hyperventilating and crying. Later, as the teacher discusses the event with the principal, Carrie can hear her sympathize with the other students, amazed that Carrie didn't know about periods.

Still, Miss Collins and the principal take pity on the girl, and they let her go home for the day and exchange vague glances and half-words about Carrie's home life. De Palma then cuts to Carrie's mother and instantly all questions about the poor young woman's insecurities are answered. Mrs. White (Piper Laurie) is a fundamentalist Christian, traveling around the neighborhood barking her rhetoric to uninterested parents about their hell-bound progeny. When both return home and Carrie tearfully recounts her day and asks why her mother never told her about menstruation, the old woman slaps her daughter and condemns "the curse of the blood" as punishment for sins. Before Carrie (or the audience) can bother to ask how sinful that must make the mother for having lived longer, the witch locks her daughter in a closet and forces her to pray for forgiveness. Carrie just can't catch a break.

De Palma, heretofore concerned with women only so far as voyeuristic targets (up to and including the credits of this film), suddenly offers a grim portrait of young womanhood. Other girls tease, boys ignore, and parents just don't understand. Oh, but there's a catch: Carrie has telekinetic powers. We all go through some pretty big changes in puberty.

Like Stephen King, who wrote the source novel to dispel accusations of his own macho fixation, De Palma uses the supernatural powers as an exaggerated take on biological growth. But De Palma refines some of the glut of King's novel, his first published and thus not the peak of his craft. He better captures the unfocused stress of adolescence, highlighting how the tiniest thing can drive Carrie to such nervous fright that a light bulb explodes or an ashtray flips over. Small actions all of them, but they build as the pressure mounts, until she finally reveals her powers to her mother in an emotional flash, causing the woman to denounce her daughter as an agent of Satan.

Spacek was the perfect choice to play Carrie. Certainly one of the most dependable and adventurous actresses ever, Spacek had already worked on a mixture of innocence and darker energy for her breakthrough in Terrence Malick's Badlands. Here, both sides of that dichotomy are further developed. To look upon Carrie is to pity her, a young woman who does not even need to take off the stereotypical glasses and let down her hair to be beautiful, but her mother has tortured her so much that Carrie believes herself to be worthless. Because she thinks this, the cruelty of youth is happy to cater to that perspective, with people like Chris enraged at Carrie for no discernible reason. Even Miss Collins joins in, reacting to the genuine remorse of Sue (Amy Irving), who tries to make up for teasing Carrie by encouraging her boyfriend (William Katt) to ask the nervous girl to prom, with distrust because she cannot imagine anyone being truly nice to Carrie without an ulterior motive. Yet Spacek can also turn 180 degrees with remarkable speed, and when Carrie starts to stand up for herself she becomes not-so-subtly intimidating before she finally snaps.

Spacek gives such a compelling performance that you might miss some of De Palma's usual cheekiness at first. Besides that wry opening shot, De Palma also gets out his kitsch in a tracking shot of all the cruel high school girls in Miss Collins' boot camp-esque detention. The director relocates the action from a Maine hamlet to the town of Bates, and Psycho references abound in the soundtrack, with screeching violins piercing the mix often. The goofy acting common in his films can be found in spades in the supporting roles, from Laurie's wildly melodramatic performance to the hilariously sleazy double act of Allen's Chris and her boyfriend (John Travolta in an early role). And when Chris and Billy prepare to sabotage Carrie's time at the prom by dumping pig's blood on her, De Palma draws out the suspense of the moment with a sequence that would feel excruciating without the slow-motion (but of course he uses it anyway). In his previous film, De Palma ended with an endlessly circling shot of reunited father and child, an overflow of emotion that made the first great argument for De Palma as a Romantic. Here, however, a similar shot, encircling Carrie and Tommy as they share a dance, comes before the end, the clear implication being that this is as good as it will get, and it's all downhill from this moment.

When the bucket of blood finally falls, De Palma shows just how far down it can go. Carrie's climactic breakdown is not so much scary as the creepiest comedy I've ever seen. With blood dripping down Carrie's head turning her homemade, white dress red, Spacek's face tightens in a rage as she imagines the stunned and silent crowd laughing at her. The corners of her mouth stretch back and her eyes bulge out as if she managed to tighten her eye sockets as well, and her vaguely amphibian appearance looks menacing instead of comical. Carrie then goes on a psychic rampage, killing all inside and dispatching Chris and Billy when they attempt to run her down in revenge. When she makes her way home, her mother will not even try to console her, attempting to kill her daughter to deliver her from Satan. Carrie responds by driving knives into her mom, and Mrs. White dies posed exactly like the crucifix she keeps in the house, a farcical piece of iconography with arrows sticking out of Christ's flesh and absurd eyes magnified to animé proportions to stress His pain. Leave it to De Palma to give us a fundamentalist whack-job accusing her daughter of Satanism only to have that young woman use a murder to purge her of Christ.

Even the "For Sale" sign planted in the collapsed and cleared wreckage of the White home (crushed by Carrie in guilt and grief) takes on a bizarrely Christian tone, doubling as a headstone for Carrie's smothered and buried corpse. That final scene, certainly the most infamous in the film, has appeared on various lists of the scariest moments in cinematic history. However, the shot of Carrie's hand reaching out of the ground to grab Sue in her dream is as funny as the opening sequence, one last "Boo!" moment that's as briefly frightening as someone sneaking up behind you and making you jump and as amusing to De Palma as such pranks are to the people who pull them. That playful attitude defines Carrie more than any outright horror, and it's amusing how this film, possibly the one De Palma is most known for -- it's either this or Scarface -- gives people a certain view of him as a director when it's not particularly any different than his previous features. But it's fitting, considering that the grand joke of the film is on those who buy the scares at surface value.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

If I had to describe Robert Altman in one word--and I wasn't allowed to use 'genius'--I'd have to go with 'ambitious.' He subverted genre films with works like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Western) and The Long Goodbye (detective noir); put out blistering satires like M*A*S*H, The Player and Prêt-à-Porter; and wove cinematic tapestries with immense casts (Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park). Choosing his most ambitious film is therefore redundant and generally depends on what criteria you're using, but you could make a strong argument for his 1977 ephemeral masterpiece 3 Women.

Altman thought up the film when he apparently had a dream that laid down the entire film for him, down to the casting. He woke up and wrote a script of it, and boom: say hello to 3 Women. As is befitting a film based on a dream, 3 Women is a rambling, indefinable journey, ethereal and haunting in its soft look and harsh feel. I couldn't possibly tell you what the film was trying to say overall, but then I don't think Altman could either.

Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule play the titular women, and all start out in defined female archetypes before slowly becoming something else entirely. Duvall plays Millie, a physical therapist at a care center; at the start of the film, Pinky Rose (Spacek) gets a job at the same center and Millie shows her the ropes. Pinky immediately looks up to Millie, who breathlessly explains her hobbies and tastes: how she dresses according to the latest magazines, how she plans meals according to the preparation they require, etc. Hers is an endless prattle, so self-absorbed that she never notices that all the neighbors and co-workers she badgers pay no attention to her and even mock her behind her back.

Not Pinky, though. She becomes obsessed with Millie, following her around and eavesdropping on conversations. When Millie's roommate Deidre moves out, Pinky jumps at the chance to be her new flatmate in order to feed her idol-worship. At their complex, we meet the third woman of the story, Willie (Rule), a pregnant woman who drains the pool and paints disturbing murals on the sides and floor. She wades through the film sad and empty; her husband Edgar, the only prominent male of the story, flirts with Pinky and even comes to Millie's apartment while his wife is in labor, just to have a little fun.

The first half of the film plays out with surprising realism, given the fact that it's come from a dream: at the very least it works as a portrait of the California desert, but we get some revealing character moments as Altman drifts over his subjects. We watch as Millie makes herself out to be the center of the world, only to be utterly ignored by everyone. She kind of deserves it, but my heart still broke when she sat between two doctors in the hospital next to the care center and prattled on and on, and kept going even though (or perhaps because) no one around her gave a damn.

Then something strange happens near the first hour-mark: Millie kicks Pinky out of her bed so she and Edgar can get down to it, and Pinky throws herself into the apartment pool in a rage, putting her into a coma. When she wakes up, she does not recognize her parents and insists that she is Millie. Here the dream aspect kicks in big time, as Altman moves through random shots and strange lighting that get thrown together in ways that cannot be explained. Quite right, if you ask me: any attempt to piece together and tell you a meaning or a message would have turned the film into cheap psychoanalysis.

I'm told the film parallels Ingmar Bergman's Persona, but I won't get my hands on that film until this Saturday, so I cannot say. Both apparently feature two female characters who in effect swap characters with each other: following her accident, Pinky dresses as Millie and even writes in Millie's diary. When Millie calls her Pinky, she blows a fuse. "My name is Mildred!" she shrieks. Edgar's wooing of Millie indirectly led to the suicide attempt, and at the end of the film suddenly Edgar moves on to Pinky.

What do these last sequences mean? Damned if I know. I'll have to go and buy myself a copy of the film and watch it several times to come up with anything. At the same time, I wonder if we're supposed to take anything from it at all. It's a dream. Frankly, everyone in this film deserves credit for even having the audacity to make it; that it turns out completely captivating and interesting only surprises me further. 3 Women easily belongs on the short list of Altman's work, and it's one of the best examples of the endless possibilities of film.

Badlands

"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died"
-Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"

Terrence Malick began work on his debut Badlands in his second year at the American Film Institute, crafting not only a script but a sales pitch complete with videos and slides for potential investors. It didn't matter, though; he got his money on the spot and ended up crafting possibly the best "road" movie ever made.

Loosely based on the infamous 1957 murder spree of Carl Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands opens with garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) walking up to Holly (Sissy Spacek), surely enough, on her front porch twirling a baton. In her voice-over, Holly describes Kit as "the handsomest man I ever saw--he looked just like James Dean." Kit gets fired from his job, and comes to sweep Holly off her feet and take her out of this dead-end town. Soon, Kit leaves bodies wherever they go.

Malick uses the voice-over to create a dialectic between the actual events on-screen and how the character interpreted them. This style would become Malick's trademark, bringing Linda's detached perspective to the love triangle in Days of Heaven and prying into the minds of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line. Holly speaks like the child she is: she views their road trip as the ultimate romantic getaway. Even as Kit blows another hole in some poor sap for no reason, she narrates her journey as if reading out of a teen magazine. Though the real Caril Ann was supposedly just as violent as Starkweather, Malick turns Holly into an innocent child who follows her boyfriend simply because he likes her. "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty," and this flattery wins her over as if Kit were Romeo incarnate.

What makes the film so interesting is how little Malick cares about these characters' psyches; Kit never gives a reason for killing, nor does he seem to enjoy it, but he murders anyway. Martin Sheen, in his major debut and possibly his finest performance, plays Kit as a man driven by loneliness and isolation. We don't know--and we never will--why he kills, but we know something went wrong in his life to make him this way. Spacek keeps Holly from being one-dimensional by giving her just enough smarts to figure out that Kit is...a little off. At the end she muses what may have drove him to his ways, but as is often the case with Malick, the point is to ask the questions, not get the answers.

Holly's voice-over and Malick's structuring deliberately rob the film of emotional impact, as he would do with his subsequent films. When Holly starts to spend time with Kit, her father disapproves and, as punishment, shoots her dog. "I was greatly distressed," recalls Holly. Because Kit gets no pleasure from his killings, the murders seem so matter-of-fact that they're emotionally draining. Malick's films would play out like anti-climaxes if they didn't spend the whole time detaching you from the proceedings, and it makes his films so singular in an industry of tropes and cliché.

What brings these two characters together? Kit is 10 years older, and Holly clearly has enough intelligence to see Kit's madness, even if it takes her awhile. What drives them to such acts of horror? The stark feel of the film seems to suggest that they see each other as kindred spirits in alienation; both feel alone even together, and crime seems to be the only thing that adds meaning to their lives. In the final moments, Holly tells us that Kit got the death penalty and she got off with parole and eventually married her lawyer's son, telling us that she's speaking to us from well into the future. It tells us that she's just as empty in the future as she is in the present. Maybe Kit got off lucky.