Tag Archives: jessica chastain

Review: “Mama”

28 Monday Jan 2013

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“Visitation Frights”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

THE FREUDIAN FREAKSHOW that is “Mama” features some genuine hair-raisers.  The movie’s monster is an undead mother who climbs the walls like a human tarantula and whose undulating hair is rivaled only by the ginger heroine in last year’s “Brave.” Linguistic analysts have shown that the syllabic repetition of “Ma-ma” originates in the infant’s primal pronunciations, in that original cry for food, warmth and only later on,936full-pan's-labyrinth-poster self-doubt and Hallmark cards. The film’s producer is Guillermo del Toro and you need only glance at the poster for his “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) to grasp his adeptness at melding horror and vaginal symbols; he’s like the gothic Georgia O’Keefe.  In “Mama,” the film’s orphans – Victoria and little sister Lily – are haunted not just by the titular specter but by oozing crevices that ruin perfectly good wallpaper, out of which flutter moths and Mama herself, sometimes in the form of a vacuum-powered toupee.

“Mama” begins with that most psychoanalytical of scenarios: abandonment. The opening, which precedes a beguiling title sequence of creepy drawings in a child’s hand, is a rush: Victoria and Lily’s father has killed his coworkers, his estranged wife, and whisked away his daughters only to veer off a snowy highway into the valley below.  He comes upon a cabin in the woods where he attempts to kill his daughters in cold blood but, low and behold, the cabin is owned and operated by a more powerful and over-protective force: Mama Mia!  Fast film-review-mama-fca7bc20726c2efaforward to the aftermath of the girls’ disappearance and their worried uncle played by Nikolaj Coster Waldau of “Game of Thrones” and girlfriend Annabel (a rocker Jessica Chastain).  Everything about Chastain’s character is thin; she sports a Joan Jett haircut, plays bass in a band, and curses like a sailor because, well, she’s hardcore. Did I mention she’s a brunette here?  She’s also a rival to Big Mama who has managed to transplant herself to the girls’ closet thanks to a pseudo-scientific study of their rehabilitation. (Why, by the way, are there no spy-cams in this joint?)  Annabel must play mother to the girls inside a home that looks like the suburban one in “Home Alone” (1990) but, of course, this is a crowded house (with ghosts and things that go bump in the night). Annabel speaks to the film’s central contrivance when she herself asks the good doctor: “This is a joke, right?”  And a hokey one at that.  Like the Ramones T-shirt she dons to demark her air of twenties cool, her character is standard issue.

hqdefaultWhat is far from standard is the fact that we see more and more of the ghoulish Mama as her secret is found out.  She has her own tragic back-story and when the girls’ surrogate family returns to the very cliff where Mama took her life, we begin to sympathize with the film’s glass-eyed ghoul. (This was Mary Shelley’s conceit in her 1818 Frankenstein.: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable!”)  This is anything but standard in your conventional horror flick: the killer isn’t entirely unkind but kind of kin.  Here, in “Mama,” we get that old familiar feeling that the thing we all love and fear the most is, well, family.

Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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“Your Detainee Will See You Now”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

NOW WHAT?  SUCH was the sentiment that snuck up and surprised any viewer of “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s last film on war and soldier psychology.  Recall Jeremy Renner, as the leader of a bomb disposal team in the Iraq war, returning home after his 265924-vlcsnap_176681last rotation. Oh how the mighty have fallen: he’s become a dad dispatched to get groceries.  We watch as a dazed Army Sergeant wanders a sterile-looking supermarket, looking out-of-place and bored by civilian life. The epigraph for that film came from Chris Hedges, a war correspondent at The New York Times: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”  Of course, “The Hurt Locker” ends with its hero back where he belongs, on the battlefield, but it’s hard to root for Army Sergeant William James when his resolution is likened to addiction.  Is this, then, a work of propaganda or pacifistic satire?

With “Zero Dark Thirty,” Bigelow’s first film since the Oscar-winning “Locker,” she stays in the (war) zone and expands her interest in America’s battles abroad and the addictive highs and lows they enable.  A similar air of futility hangs over the action of “ZDT.”  Here, we have a heroine, a CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who vows “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m gonna kill bin Laden.”  That revenge killing, which occupies 40 of the film’s 157 minutes, is certainly its climax, but the road to that now legendary raid on Bin Laden’s compound in the Pakastani city of Abbottabad, is where “ZDT” largely dwells. This is a film, controversially so, that gives us the interrogation rooms, torture chambers, and “black sites” that made the night of May 2nd, 2011 and the heroic efforts of SEAL Team 6, possible.  At the same time, “ZDT” asks whether all of those closed-door procedures were really worth it?  The film may end with a mission accomplished, but there is seemingly nothing but a string of defeats and detonations along the way.

At its core, “ZDT” traces the metamorphosis of a friendless, work-obsessed Maya.  At the start, she’s only an ambivalent participant in the waterboarding of a suspect, Ammar (Reda Kateb), an Arab man with known ties to al-Qaeda bank accounts.  Up until the final scene, she’s as cold as ice.1134604 - Zero Dark Thirty  Bigelow’s writing partner, Mark Boal, is again on hand to pepper the script with intel of a different kind: “Everybody breaks – it’s biology,” says CIA field agent Dan (Jason Clarke) as he systematically destroys the mind and body of his detainee.  Much of “ZDT” is hard to watch – beyond the torture, there’s the suspenseful scene in which a Jordanian with information regarding bin Laden’s whereabouts slowly penetrates the bunkers of an American base – and when it’s all over, the viewer is again faced with the uncertainties that define a potentially un-winnable war against terrorism.  All that we know for certain is what Maya believes must be the case: an electronically cut-off bin Laden must be communicating with a courier named Abu Ahmed.  Catch the courier and catch the killer of 3,000 plus Americans.

If not for the ambiguous final shot of “Zero Dark Thirty,” it would be far easier to allege that Bigelow’s latest is on par with John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” (1968), a pep rally for the Vietnam War.  I, for one, am deeply discomforted by the idea that real-life works of American militarism can be turned immediately into a mainstream movie; this only zero-dark-Thirty-30-entertainment-news-Jessica-Chastain-719462581further blurs the line between war and entertainment in an era of “Call of Duty” and “Six Days in Fallujah.” As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote after World War 2, “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.”  But Bigelow spares us hawkish politics for something more sly, more cynical. The only time we even hear President Obama speaking is when he’s giving an interview to “60 Minutes” and denouncing torture in a film that unflinchingly puts America’s torture of Muslim prisoners on display.  In the foreground are Maya and her fellow operatives, barely listening to their boss on the boob-tube; the suggestion is that they operate outside the law.  That exposes the official, albeit hypocritical, stance of the White House, and by extension, the nation at large, for what it really is: just noise.

Potentially, the real torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” lies not in those excruciatingly cruel interrogation scenes but in Chastain’s final expression.  What is Maya thinking exactly?  Is it relief or remorse?  With the hunt over, tears fall and if our heroine isn’t thinking “Now what?”, she may have something even more radical, even more un-American, on her mind, which is: What for?

Review: “Lawless”

30 Thursday Aug 2012

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“Flawless?”

Grade: C+/B- (RENT IT)

A FAMILY THAT bootlegs together stays together, right?  At least that was the motto of the Bondurant brothers, a feisty frat servin’ up moonshine in Franklin County, Virginia, and the centerpiece of John Hillcoat’s new crime drama “Lawless.”  Benoit Delhomme’s camerawork, pitched to a dusty brown, and the twang of Lucinda Williams, effectively transport us to those dusty days of the Depression.  The year is 1931 and the major players are the hard-bitten Forrest (Tom Hardy), war veteran Howard (Jason Clarke) and baby brother Jack (a beefed-up Shia LaBeouf).  With the help of Cricket, their disabled friend played by Dane DeHaan, the Bondurants operate a successful watering hole in the back hills of Apalachia.

Jack has his eye on Bertha (Mia Wasikowska), a preacher’s daughter just dying for a ride in his flashy convertible and the intoxications of Jack’s outlaw image.  The spectacular but sidelined Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “Take Shelter”) plays Maggie “Red” Beauford, a former dancer turned barmaid who helps the brothers sling their white lightning.   They all maintain amicable connections with the authorities of Franklin who look the other way while taking a few sips themselves.

That is until Chicago lawman Charlie Rakes (an eyebrow-less Guy Pearce) arrives on the scene to demolish the boys’ American pastoral and false sense of invincibility.  Who kicks a man when he’s down?  Special Deputy Rakes does and viciously so.  The locals murmur that Rakes wears perfume and as he gores Jack across his own backyard, he worries that he’ll bloody his crisp pinstripe suit and swimming cap of pomaded hair.  Jack recovers, tensions mount, and during a first date gone terribly wrong, Bertha happily trades in her head scarf and church-going clothes for the yellow, strawberry-patterned dress Jack has brought her.  All around them, meanwhile, Rakes and his corrupt cronies are bearing down.

The consummate charmer, LaBeouf is known for his effortless chemistry with female costars and though he (and costar Hardy) are in desperate need of dialect coaching, “Lawless” broadens both actors’ likability.  More so than the chirpy LaBeouf, Hardy croaks his lines as he did as the dog-muzzled Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”  His dialect coach had to have been a bullfrog with a double tracheotomy.  More problematic than the performances, the script is from Australian rocker Nick Cave, known for his violently balladry, and based on “The Wettest County in the World” by the Bondurant brothers’ descendant, Matt Bondurant.

“Lawless” is a scrambled egg of a script.  One particular sequence, which move from Forrest’s throat being cut in the dirt, an offscreen sexual assault on Maggie, to the aftermath of both these horrors, is as disjointed as the surrounding scenes.  Gary Oldman, as Floyd Banner, even shows his villainish face, but he remains, puzzlingly so, on the margins of the Cave’s plotline.  Pearce’s Rakes is more than enough villain to go around, but the role written for him is a despicable cliché: a sadistic fop who, aside from hating to be called out for his effeminacy, has no real motivation.  You half expect him to victimize Cricket in other ways when he finally gets his manicured hands on him in the woods, and the punishment he has coming to him by the vengeful Bondurants, is both predictable and lacking in dramatic purpose.   The bloody fate that Deputy Rakes faces should have been staged in a more intimate fashion with dialogue rather than just bullets exchanged.

Thus “Lawless” ends with another familiar feeling:  Chicago, it’s a hell of a town.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “Take Shelter”

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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“Fall Out Boy”

Review: “Take Shelter”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

OSCAR SEASON IS upon us and the great Michael Shannon as Curtis in John Nichols’ nerve-wracking new film “Take Shelter” shouldn’t lose his seat amongst the usual suspects – DiCaprio, Clooney, and Pitt – when the 2011 Academy Awards convene next year.  Whether he’s playing Nelson Van Elden, the repressed Protestant and Federal Prohibition agent on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” or the wild-eyed prophet in “Revolutionary Road” (2008), Shannon is hands-down the most electrifying actor on screen today and “Take Shelter” is his tour-de-force.

But Shannon will also break your heart in part because this brilliant examination of mental illness in an age of American anxiety refuses to pin him down as either a schizo or a Tiresias.  Either way, his family and neighbors begin to worry when Curtis LaForche, a faithful husband, father and hard-worker in his heartland community, begins to build a panic room out back.  “Missed you at church this morning, Curtis,” says a neighbor to which he replies flatly (his mind, in this film, always someplace else): “I’m thinking of cleaning up that storm shelter out back.”

What prompts his growing panic are hair-raising nightmares in which his dog Red bites him, his deaf daughter Hannah is snatched by shadowy figures, and his wife Samantha (this year’s ingénue Jessica Chastain) menaces him with a kitchen knife.  The unifying theme in all of Curtis’s dreams is persecution: ominous storm clouds rolling in and swaths of dive-bombing birds like Hitchcock’s birds except on Prednisone.  After checking out Understanding Mental Illness from the local library, he visits his mother (Kathy Baker) whose own paranoid schizophrenia led her to a lifetime inside a health-care facility.  “There was always some panic that took hold of me,” she tells Curtis, “people listening to me.”  Like mother, like son?  You be the judge.

Yet “Take Shelter” isn’t exactly a thriller as it aims ultimately for the kind of ambiguity normally forbidden on the big screen.  As director Nichols (who also cast Shannon in 2007’s “Shotgun Stories”) recently explained: “We carry a lot of anxiety and fear and stress about our lives and the world around us staying on track and I thought that was something a lot of people could identify with and I thought it was worth making a film about.”  Worth it, indeed.  Are Curtis’s portentous dreams the work of a madman or an everyman prophet?  Only the film’s dazzling last scene points toward a possible answer and like Shannon’s wrenching performance, it’s impossible to shake.

Review: “The Debt”

05 Monday Sep 2011

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“Schindler’s Fist”

Film Review: “The Debt” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“Terribly and terrifyingly normal.”  That was Hannah Arendt’s memorable description, from 1963, after seeing Adolf Eichmann, one of the evil architects of the Holocaust and only Nazi to be executed on Israeli ground after the war, stand trial for crimes against humanity.  It was exactly Eichmann’s bourgeois normalness that terrified Arendt the most.  Even the most destructive of men, she realized, can look like, well, Joe the Plumber.

Every bit the Nazi monster, Eichmann was also a pencil-pusher and a bureaucrat, and as Arendt would argue, in her controversial “Report on the Banality of Evil” from Eichmann in Jerusalem, all the more dangerous because he himself could be pushed around.  In the end, he was a mere “organization man” whose unthinking compliance made the deportation and deaths of millions as easy as the flip of a switch.  “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him,” Arendt observed, “and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

That banality of evil, as Arendt would famously phrase it, is what gives the many face-to-face confrontations between Mossad special agent, Rachel Singer, and Nazi monster, Dieter Vogel, their thrilling charge in John Madden’s “The Debt” (a reboot of a 2007 Israeli thriller adapted by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Godlman and Peter Straughan).  Their tense scenes together involve straight razors, needles, even speculums and they’ll make you want to look away.   The wicked Dr. Vogel (played by Jesper Christensen) is best (or worst) known as the sadistic Surgeon of Birkenau, and he’s been hiding in plain sight in an East Berlin gynecology practice since the fall of the Third Reich.  He has a pleasant looking wife, also his nurse, and he appears, on the surface, well, normal.   Incognito as Dr. Vogel’s timid patient, Rachel exchanges pleasant chitchat with the good doctor as she prepares, with the help of her two fellow agents, to forcibly apprehend the fugitive and bring him to justice.

The young Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain, surely 2011’s greatest revelation on screen.  She was ethereal as the virtually mute mother in Terrence Malick’s superb “The Tree of Life,” effervescent in “The Help,” and here, in “The Debt,” she’s every bit as forceful and effective as the third corner in a triangle of operatives consisting of Stephan (Marton Csokas) and David (Sam Worthington of “Avatar” and “Terminator Salvation”).  The film occupies several points on the same timeline all at once.   Juxtaposed with the kidnapping of Vogel in 1965 Berlin is modern-day Tel Aviv where Rachel, thirty years later, is now famous for shooting Vogel dead and making her people proud.

But did she?  Is her version of Vogel’s killing truthful, or could the Nazi doctor have fled and Rachel, and Stephan, and David’s account of events be a fabrication?   A terrific trio of actors plays the agents at middle-age (Helen Mirren as Rachel, Tom Wilkinson as Stephan and Ciaran Hinds as David).  They’re still busy trying to rewrite history, and since this reviewer is no spoiler, all I will say is that this triangle, young and old, has more than a few lies to protect.  What powers “The Debt” is the same Hitler-directed revenge fantasy that powered two modern-day classics: 1976’s “The Marathon Man” and Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” of 2009.

Hanah Arendt and the banality of evil is surely a useful lens through which “The Debt” should be viewed.  More accessible perhaps is someone a bit closer to (cinematic) home, that is, Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones, Jr., PhD who, in his “Last Crusade” of 1989, has the last word when he says with a sigh: “Nazis.  I hate these guys.”

Review: “The Help”

25 Thursday Aug 2011

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“Separate but Sequel?”

Movie Review: “The Help” (2011)

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was imprisoned for eight days in an Alabama jailhouse.  The crime?  Leading a peaceful protest against the institutionalized racism of the age otherwise known as segregation.  The result?  M.L.K’s masterwork “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” perhaps the second most important work of antiauthoritarian argumentation after that little-known piece of paper called “The Declaration of Independence.”  In a blend of aphorism and oratory, King writes of what he calls the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” adding: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  The part, in other words, infects the whole.

The part in Tate Taylor’s “The Help” is the kitchen or the nursery in any ordinary Southern house and the whole is the deeply racist and paranoid world outside.  The uniformed maids working long hours in those humid, white-owned spaces have grown bitter and resentful after generations of hardship.  Known euphemistically as “the help,” they’ve got a few stories to tell about the white women they’re forced to “Yes Ma’am” all damn day long.  All they need is a person in power to get the word out, to publicize their notes from the underground.  They get more than they bargain for when a brash white woman comes home, proclaiming: “I’d like to write something from the view of the help.”

Based on the much-anticipated film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel, “The Help,” director Tate Taylor preserves Stockett’s sense that even the domestic sphere has something instructive to say about the world outside.  Set not in Birmingham but in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the narrative unfolds inside a hermetically-sealed world of upper-class white privilege, one in which dessert forks and serving from the left still matter.  There’s Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a veritable slave-master in a beehive who believes wholeheartedly that black maids should use separate bathrooms from whites, and Allison Janney as the cowardly mother of the film’s white heroine, Skeeter (the starlet du jour Emma Stone of “Easy A” and “Crazy Stupid Love”).  It’s not just Skeeter’s name that sets her apart from the vapid dilettanti of Jackson high society but Skeeter’s freckles, corkscrew hair, her literary aspirations, and her little interest in marriage and men.  When Skeeter returns home as an Ole Miss alumnus with a new writing job, her mother corners her about her unconventionality, worried that she’s having “unnatural thoughts” about the same sex.  “I read there’s a cure,” blurts a worried Janney, even a “brew tea” to make her more like Hilly and herself.

But Skeeter sticks to her guns and to the marginalized black help of Jackson, namely Aibileen (the indomitable Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer).  Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   She has a fascinating face – deep and protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and alongside Spencer’s Minny, she’s the emotional core of “The Help.”  The two provide Skeeter with first-person accounts of their humiliations.  One of Skeeter’s questions, which we hear twice, is even sadder the second time: “How does it feel to raise white children while your own children are being raised by someone else?”  Unsure, or perhaps afraid, to answer, Aibileen can only stare at the portrait of her dead son (the victim of a racial hate crime) on her kitchen wall.   When the testimonials of Aibileen and Minny grow into Skeeter’s book-length exposé of white establishment, the joke is mainly on Hilly.

The film’s pace and performances are equally fine.  It’s refreshing to see Bryce Dallas Howard drop the usual blankness of her expression and relish in the bitchy malevolence of her role.  Her senile mother, played by a cat-eyed Sissy Spacek, garners laughs since even she finds her daughter’s racist airs repugnant.  On the narrative sidelines, perhaps, is the character of Celia (played by Jessica Chastain, the ethereal mother-figure in “The Tree of Life”) who, like Skeeter, sees no value in separate bathrooms and dining areas and relies on Minny (who is fired by Hilly for insubordination) to teach her how to cook and play the perfect wife.  The fact that she can’t get pregnant and that she’s viewed as a harlot by the in-crowd has driven her slightly batty.

By empathizing with Celia’s predicament as well as Minny’s, “The Help” smartly rounds out the various levels of subjugation at work in 1960s culture.  What’s worrisome about America’s nostalgic return to that era – thanks to “Mad Men” and its various offspring – is that the age of the skinny tie was, in reality, an age of wide disparity.  For every Don Draper in a skyscraper there were a million more Aibileens and Minnies.  The ditsy Celia is as much a victim as they are since all these women, white or black, are relegated to social roles that simply don’t fit.  The main deficiency of “The Help” is that it doesn’t do enough with this parallel form of oppression.  Too eager to please, the film loves to watch Hilly fall flat on her face over and over again, but in this respect, it can’t see the forest for the trees.  “The Help” misses the fact that racism and patriarchy are overlapping forces, which means that even the most villainous women are sometimes victims.