SMASHED

SMASHED
Written by James Ponsoldt and Susan Berke
Directed by James Ponsoldt
Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul and Octavia Spencer

Jenny: It’s hard to live your life with honesty, y’know.

As I write this review, I am very slowly nursing a rather large cup of coffee, trying to figure out where I’m going to find the energy to get dressed at some point and squinting to see the words I am typing on the screen. The result is always the same and you would think that after so many years, I would know better. Yet, here I am, again. I had too much to drink last night and everything today is going to be that much more difficult for it. Still, I think it could be worse. I could have woken up in a pool of my own urine and be drinking again by the time I get in the shower today. Heck, I could even drink straight from the bottle while I’m actually in the shower! While I am very fortunate that this is not my life, this is just another day in the life of Kate Hannah, a wife and elementary school teacher whose life is all about getting SMASHED, which, incidentally, is also the title of one this year’s greatest surprises in film.

Getting smashed is a fantastic way to put your troubles way the hell out of your mind but there comes a point in time when you realize that doing it as much as you do, may actually be causing all of your life troubles. Such is the realization Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has one day when she throws up in class and, rather then tell her grade one class that she just isn’t feeling well, she lies and tells them that she is in fact pregnant instead. This of course upsets her because, let’s be honest, how on earth is she going to get out of this one, and her natural inclination when things go sour is to drink. Her husband (Aaron Paul) is no help either, as their favorite thing to do together is get stinking drunk. And I’m talking biking in the middle of the street and peeing right in the middle on a convenience store, drunk. So, when Kate decides it is time to get sober, their marriage is put to its biggest test.

SMASHED shouldn’t work theoretically. Winstead is an unproven lead and the supporting cast is made up of sitcom actors (real life husband and wife, Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally), to say nothing of the serious subject matter that is given a decidedly lighter tone. Still, it does work and well at that. This is due first in great part to Winstead herself. She manages to make a fairly unlikable character sympathetic and strong. As she sobers up, it is like she can see her life clearer and clearer with every passing day. She doesn’t like what she sees, nor does she like the decisions she knows she has to make in order to successfully remain sober, but she does them all the same. Each step she takes, some less heavy then others of course, we are right there by her side, thanks to the delicate and respectful direction of James Ponsoldt. Under him, all the elements come together, some comedic and some brutally honest, to create an intimate and revealing look at how a life is put back together after it has been smashed to pieces.

408. The Help

408. (03 Sep) The Help (2011, Tate Taylor)* 54



The Help is so cloying and manipulative, it's almost implausible a performance like Viola Davis' can exist within it. The film simply doesn't deserve her, as Davis gives a performance with such grace and nuance the rest of the cast looks amateurish in her wake. The bug-eyed Octavia Spencer, for instance, is positively exhausting to watch, playing broad comedy as if she wandered out of a TBS sitcom. I'm unclear how both of these ladies can be considered on par in Oscar buzz.

The film itself is so shamelessly tear-jerking, sentimental, and crowd-pleasing, it seems destined for a Best Picture nomination. That's an excessive honor, to be sure, for a film that overplays a poopy pie joke and derails in its unrelentingly upbeat finale. (A senile Sissy Spacek saying she can only remember that she was put in a nursing home by Bryce Dallas Howard and that her daughter ate poop is where the gag has clearly been beaten to death.) The lengthy run-time is felt in the last hour when an out of nowhere argument erupts between Emma Stone and Chris Lowell. For the most part, The Help is well-structured enough to maintain interest, but the need to tie up loose ends with the last few scenes is the film's undoing.

Sharen Davis' costumes would be a worthy awards competitor. A plaid jacket Lowell wears in his second scene with Stone is an outstanding costumes and all of the work here easily outshines her forgettable garbs from Ray and Dreamgirls. She rivals Anna B. Sheppard as one of those costume designers with no range, but she's in her wheelhouse with The Help.

THE HELP

Written and Directed by Tate Taylor

Starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard and Octavia Spencer

Aibileen: What if you don't like what I got to say 'bout white people?

Jackson, Mississippi has a rich history but it certainly also has its fair share of shame. Great turmoil does however make for great drama in novice filmmaker, Tate Taylor’s THE HELP, based on the wildly popular novel of the same name, written by Kathryn Stockett, one of Tate’s oldest friends. They grew up together in the South and their combined familiarity with the subject gives them the distinct perspective necessary to explore the complicated dynamics between white families and the black maids that kept them together. While it is perfectly acceptable for the maids to handle the dinner and the children, it is somehow unthinkable to have them use the same toilet. That's the way it was in Jackson in 1962 and even though some practices were just a step or two away from slavery still, everybody kept to their roles with big smiles on their faces. That's just the way it was done, the way it had always been done … until someone finally started asking why.

In the 1960's, America was in the throes of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. led a quarter million people in prayer at the March on Washington and progress seemed achievable. Meanwhile, in the South, black men and women were being beaten senseless, or worse yet killed, for any attempt to push the civil rights movement forward. It was most certainly not a good time for a black maid to sit down and recount what working for white people was really like. It would seem even more ludicrous to share these potentially damaging stories with an actual white woman. Regardless, this is what Aibileen (Viola Davis) does when Eugenia (Emma Stone) asks her, not because she's always done what white women have asked of her, but because it was time. The stories she tells are both heartbreaking and heart warming, revealing just how complex these relationships truly are. There is love between some of these women, of that there is no question. And yet there is also superiority and ownership and perhaps most importantly, there is tradition. This is what all these women know. Change is not easy; making change is even harder.

There is so much unrest in these situations but you would never know. The trick is to never let on, a perfect glow must shine on the surface at all times. Of course, it is all terribly ironic that these maids are the ones to polish these particular surfaces. That said, there is plenty of shine in THE HELP. Taylor’s lack of experience behind the camera shows when certain delicate moments feel a tad rushed, but that hardly matters when the entire cast is this delightful and endearing. While it is refreshing to see Stone play something other than sarcastic for a change, and naturally Davis anchors the picture with great weight, it is Bryce Dallas Howard as queen of the white ladies, Hilly Holbrook, and lesser know, Octavia Spencer, as the feistiest of maids, Minny, who truly give THE HELP the punch it requires to become as memorable and enjoyable as it is. Collectively, the entire cast, rounded out by touching performances from Sissy Spacek and Alison Janney, maintain an air of ease, which is even more so commendable considering how they all know somewhere in the back of their minds that everything they know is about to change forever. The best part is that you can also see that some of these women know this change is for the best.