Blu-Ray Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[Note: I received this disc from Warner Bros. as part of their Blu-Ray Elite program.]

Film

Any movie that opens with an artistic abstraction of a body falling to signify someone jumping from one of the Twin Towers can't hope for greatness, but the shamelessness of Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is breathtaking in its outrage. In fairness, it was always going to be this way. An adaptation of the hideous book by Jonathan Safran Foer, the worst, most self-satisfied writer in America today, EL&IC does not so much process the horror of September 11 and its bewildering aftermath through the eyes of a possibly autistic 9-year-old as use this blank protagonist to skirt any sincere approach to the tragedy.

Oskar (Thomas Horn, discovered being robotic and eerily smart on Jeopardy's Kids Week) roams around New York seeking some sense of closure for his father's (Tom Hanks) death in the terrorist attack, especially concerned with finding what his father's mysterious key unlocks. The lad, afraid of subways, runs around the city with a tambourine so that we have something to irritate us when the soundtrack isn't dominated by Horn's monotoned complaints about things that make him nervous. Unable to process emotion, he intrudes upon the turbulent lives of adults dealing with their own issues and presses them to answer his questions. For a movie supposedly about coping with 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts a disgusting inability to deal with the realities of life and the manner in which banal sorrows do not cease with the occurrence of large-scale travesties.

Slow-motion shots of a vase symbolically shattering and the shallow focus of Oskar's Asperger-vision mark Daldry's only major artistic contributions to Foer's godawful prose. No, scratch that, there's also the matter of the frenetically edited, swirling montages set to Oskar's speech when he grows frantic in his word diarrhea. All of this is set to perhaps the worst, least subtle score the great Alexandre Desplat has ever composed, a treacly mess of shameless strings and woodwinds that trade Desplat's gift for atmosphere for an Oscar-baiting, unsubtle mess.

An all-star cast is utterly wasted, with the sole exception of Max von Sydow as the mute renter living in Oskar's grandmother's apartment. Von Sydow's magnificent face, stony yet expressive, is at once more contemplative and more youthful than the perpetual look of mild irritation on Horn's mug. The reason for his self-imposed silence is telegraphed from miles away, but von Sydow breathes some life into this picture, and his every gesture is to be treasured. But even he is weighed down by the oppressive, naïve sentiment of it all. This is one of the worst movies ever made, a patronizing statement that it's alright to move on delivered to audiences who long since have. Like most movies about unfathomable tragedies as seen through a child's perspective, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a moral cop-out, a simplistic means of tearjerking that engages its touchy subject on no level other than exploitation. I steered clear from this movie upon its original release over some of the furor that greeted it, but even distanced from the anti-hype, I still loathed this movie.

A/V

This being a contemporary film, the technical specs are naturally robust. It's a shame they're in service to such drivel: to say that the sight of the burning Towers has never looked more crisp than in the 1080p transfer is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nevertheless, the flat, depressed color schemes of Chris Menges' cinematography are reproduced clearly and cleanly. The 5.1 lossless mix evenly distributes Desplat's score and foregrounds the dialogue with clarity. In the moments where Oskar's speech grows frantic, the surround-sound mix truly comes out, overwhelming speakers with his insufferable, cut-up ramblings.

Extras

A smattering of features detail the making of the film from its general production to the discovery and instruction of Thomas Horn. Best of all, however, is Max von Sydow: Dialogues with "Renter." It's easily the best extra, if for no other reason that it gives an even longer view of one of the cinema's great actors, who is engaging even when standing still in the wardrobe department. Consisting solely of set footage, this feature gives an insight not only into Sydow's work as an actor but serves as a better making-of featurette than the actual making-of also included on the disc. Hell, it's better and more human than the film to which it is attached, which is admittedly saying nothing at all.

Bottom Line

The A/V quality and features do the film a service it does not deserve. Other than the chance to see von Sydow in his element and wholly at ease after six decades of doing this, there's nothing, including and especially the actual movie, to recommend this. For von Sydow fans, I'd say Rent It but don't bother with film. For everyone else, Avoid at All Costs.

Thomas Horn | From Jeopardy champ to child actor in “EXTREMELY LOUD”

No doubt there are those Thomases who can't help but be Toms. The always-affable Tom Hanks, for instance.

Then there are those who defy diminution. Such is the case with first-time film actor Thomas Horn. The 14-year-old Jeopardy! whiz kid holds his own against the Oscar-winning likes of Hanks and Sandra Bullock, who play his parents in Warner Bros.' 9/11-centered drama “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

In 2010, producer Scott Rudin was among those TV viewers impressed by Horn's display of steely nerves and card-shark cool after he wagered $12,000 in Final Jeopardy and won $38,100 with the answer: "What is a census?" That led to an audition for the role of Oskar Schell, a brainy but socially isolated lad left adrift after his father dies in the World Trade Center attacks.

The movie is heavy-duty, and so is its star. This still-sprouting, beacon-bright ninth-grader, who hails from the San Francisco area, doesn't suffer fools nor foolish inquiries gladly.

Jokingly asked if he is going to answer questions in the form of a question, Jeopardy!-style, Horn simply rolls his eyes, slightly grimaces and remains silent. He also would rather keep some personal info under wraps.

This son of an oncologist mother and an ophthalmologist father speaks three languages. Besides English, he is fluent in Croatian, thanks to his mother's side of the family. And he is studying Mandarin. "I just thought it would be a great, useful language to learn because it's the most widely spoken first language."

Unlike some showbiz youngsters, acting was never a goal for Horn. His only other experience was as a grasshopper in a fifth-grade stage performance of James and the GiantPeach. But his time as an insect did nothing to prepare him for being in almost every scene — and narrating a good portion of the action off-screen — of a major Hollywood production.

As an 11-year-old loner who feels let down by his mother and lost without his father, Horn must run the gamut of emotions from extreme joy to incredible grief. He also must be somewhat irritating since his character exhibits signs of Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism. But with the help of dialogue and acting coaches, as well as supportive co-stars who had his back, Horn delivers what director Stephen Daldry calls "one of the greatest screen performances by a young actor in the history of cinema — he is exceptional."

Horn returns the compliment. He says of the British filmmaker behind such acclaimed titles as “Billy Elliot” (which also features an exceptional boy) and “The Hours”: "He really let me have my creative take on things, even though, as a first-time actor, I don't really deserve it. Whenever he thought I could use a suggestion, he would give one. But in a really kind way and without hurting my feelings. I'm kind of a sensitive, thin-skinned person, so it's a great achievement."

Both Hanks and Bullock looked out for their on-screen son and got a kick out of watching him fully embrace the task at hand.

"He started off with a degree of comfort and never changed," says Hanks. "He was constant as the speed of light. If only we could steal his ability to focus the way he does. His concentration was rather off the scale sometimes."

Bullock did feel compelled to provide some etiquette pointers now and then, especially given Horn's habit of stomping when he walks. "He would blow by us women," she says. "Coming out of a stairwell, he would just blow by and push the door open. I told him, 'OK, with ladies, you need to stop, open the door and stay.' You could just feel him going, 'Oh, this is such a nuisance.' "

Horn is up for doing more films and has read some scripts. Still, college definitely looms. As for a major, he says, "probably something practical, like computer science and math." Though he is too young to remember the events of 9/11, Horn understands why some moviegoers might have mixed feelings about revisiting the tragic day.

Yet the theme of the film, he says, is ultimately a positive one: "Grief, no matter where it comes from, can only be resolved by connecting to other people."

(Now showing across the Philippines on Feb. 29, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.)

MAX VON SYDOW gets Oscar nomination for “EXTREMELY LOUD”

Venerated actor Max von Sydow plays a mysterious old man who can communicate only via scrawls on a notepad yet becomes a boy’s only confidante on his quest across New York, in Warner Bros.' “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Von Sydow recently won a much-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for portraying the enigmatic, silent man known only as “The Renter.”

Nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is a story that unfolds from inside the young mind of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), an inventive eleven year-old New Yorker whose discovery of a key in his deceased father’s belongings sets him off on an urgent search across the city for the lock it will open. A year after his father (Tom Hanks) died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center on what Oskar calls “The Worst Day,” he is determined to keep his vital connection to the man who playfully cajoled him into confronting his wildest fears.

Von Sydow – whose prodigious film career began in the 1950s with Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” and continued through ten more films with Bergman and six decades of memorable and award-winning roles – had a strong emotional reaction to the story of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

“I was extremely moved by the script, which doesn’t happen often,” von Sydow states. “And I liked the idea of playing this enigmatic figure, this apparent stranger who tries to help Oskar in his search. It really is an interesting friendship that develops between them.”

The character remains mute throughout the movie, so the actor strove to express his moments of anguish, curiosity and delight entirely through his face and body. Says director Stephen Daldry of the unusual, wordless performance: “Max turned in a performance unlike any other he’s done — and I think it’s the kind of performance he’s always wanted to do. I honestly believe he’s created one of the most extraordinary characters of his career; he’s profoundly nuanced, complicated, funny and sensitive…without uttering a sound.”

Opening across the Philippines on Feb. 29, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

SANDRA BULLOCK, incredibly affecting in “EXTREMELY LOUD”

Two years after winning an Academy Award for “The Blind Side,” Sandra Bullock takes the role of grief-stricken mother whose apparent absence in her son's life is not quite what it seems, in Warner Bros.' heartwrenching drama, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

Nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards, the film is a story that unfolds from inside the young mind of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), an inventive eleven year-old New Yorker whose discovery of a key in his deceased father’s belongings sets him off on an urgent search across the city for the lock it will open. A year after his father (Tom Hanks) die on 9/11 in the World Trade Center on what Oskar calls “The Worst Day,” he is determined to keep his vital connection to the man who playfully cajoled him into confronting his wildest fears.

“What I find so moving about Oskar is that he feels there has to be an answer, but there is not always a clear ‘why’ or a ‘because’ to a situation,” Bullock says. “And sometimes the answer you get is not the one you expect, which is something Oskar has to discover for himself.”

Unlike Oskar’s father, his mother, Linda (Bullock), has always found it tough to reach her son, and that only seems to increase by a factor of 10 when her husband is no longer there to bridge the gap. Yet, much as she seems lost in her own private realm of grief, Linda is connecting to Oskar in ways of which he is not even aware.

Director Stephen Daldry felt there was an organic empathy in Bullock that would allow the role to work. “Sandra is a first-rate actress who really took her role to heart,” he says. “She looked after Thomas very well and formed a strong relationship with him that translated to the screen. She was able to bring a gravitas that was entirely appropriate but also a real charm.”

For Bullock, the intriguing part was playing a mother who has to work at bonding with her son and forging her own route back into his world after his father’s death. “I think when her husband was alive, Linda was always okay with just stepping back and letting Oskar and his father be a great team together,” she observes. “But now that Oskar has lost his playmate and the one person who grounded him and who he felt was his intellectual equal, she isn’t sure she can be any of those things to her son. And she’s in the process of grieving too, so she doesn’t have much energy to fight for that connection she so desperately wants with him. She has to struggle to find the solution.”

Given the subjective, first-person viewpoint of the film, Bullock also had to play her character the way Oskar perceives her – which was especially difficult because Oskar does not see the full picture of his mother. “I had to come to grips with the idea that the audience is seeing Linda on the screen entirely through Oskar’s point of view – and his view of her is not always very favorable,” she explains. “In some scenes, she can seem to be the opposite of nurturing, yet later, it becomes clear what is really going on with her. Still, I had to be okay with her looking at times like she wasn’t being a good mother to a child who is really in need. Part of it is that what Oskar sees is her grief, which is ugly and imperfect, but also very real. But what Oskar doesn’t know is that she is also very worried about him and that causes her to really try to think like he does.”

To explore Linda Schell’s experience more deeply, Bullock listened to recordings of phone calls and voice-mail messages left by those trapped in the World Trade Center for their families. “That was very hard for me,” she says. “But what floored me was to hear people giving comfort to those they were leaving behind. You really understand that the pain of hearing that is something that could never go away.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

TOM HANKS, the perfect dad in “EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE”

Two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks stars as Thomas Schell, a devoted husband and father who was at the wrong place, at the wrong time during the fateful day of 9/11, in Warner Bros.' life-affirming drama, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

The film is a story that unfolds from inside the young mind of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), an inventive eleven year-old New Yorker whose discovery of a key in his deceased father’s belongings sets him off on an urgent search across the city for the lock it will open. A year after his father died in the World Trade Center on what Oskar calls “The Worst Day,” he is determined to keep his vital connection to the man who playfully cajoled him into confronting his wildest fears.

As a screen character, Thomas Schell was a challenge because he is seen entirely through Oskar’s eyes, to the extent that much about his history and inner life remain mysterious -- except for the parts that have made an impression on Oskar and especially Oskar’s memories of their very best times together, which remain indelibly immediate to him.

To embody the essence of a father as captured in time by his young son, director Stephen Daldry thought early on of Tom Hanks. “We thought that in terms of Oskar’s memories of Thomas as the perfect dad...well, who else could that be but Tom Hanks?” recalls Daldry. “Tom took that responsibility to heart and created a real bond with child actor Thomas Horn that was evident to everybody on the set. They were absolutely charming together, which was great for me as a filmmaker, because they created this dynamic relationship and all I had to do was shoot it. It was an act of real dedication by an extraordinary actor and collaborator.”

Hanks was drawn to the way the script gets inside Oskar’s mind at a time when the power of logical facts to keep him grounded seems to have evaporated. “In the blink of an eye, the course of Oskar’s whole world changes, and he loses his only anchor,” Hanks says. “His father used to tell him that there are always clues and treasures to be found in the world. So when he finds his father’s key, it’s very interesting that Oskar devises his own elaborate hunt for what the key might mean, convinced it will somehow explain the unexplained to him. It becomes a very personal, intimate story of a kid trying to make sense in his own way of a nonsensical world.”

He adds: “It was easiest thing in the world for me to want to do this – as soon as I read it, there was not even any question.”

The actor says he gave a lot of consideration to the kind of father Thomas was to Oskar prior to his death. He also kept in mind that Thomas was himself a child of immigrants who took up the trade of jewelry as his only clear opportunity to support his family, even though he dreamed of being a scientist. “I think Thomas was someone who felt the real task in his life was to make sure that his very bright son became a well-rounded, content human being who might make the world a better place,” Hanks says. “Since Thomas himself grew up without a father, fathering Oskar was the most important thing to him. I think he loved inventing wild stories for Oskar, like the one he makes up about New York’s lost Sixth Borough, but he also very clearly designed these stories to get Oskar out in the world and help him feel safe there.”

In part, Hanks drew on his own experiences as a father. “The emotional part of it for me was going back and remembering what it’s like to have an 11-year-old kid who is bubbling over with life,” he says.

While Hanks believes Thomas was well aware that Oskar often showed signs of behavior akin to Asperger’s Syndrome, he also says Thomas readily accepted and even related to many of his son’s oddities and phobias, which made the two of them even closer. “I think Thomas wasn’t bothered at all by his son’s behaviors,” he says. “Instead, he looked for ways to build bridges over Oskar’s turbulence, over his constant questions, his flights of fancy and his fears. Yet because of that, when he’s gone, it magnifies the incredible loss for Oskar even more.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

The day after 9/11 in “EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE”

One of the most definitive novels about 9/11 becomes one of the year’s most cathartic cinematic experiences as Warner Bros. brings to the screen “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. Directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Reader,” “The Hours”), the film has been nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards.

In 2005 the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, already renowned for his blend of incisive comedy and tragedy in his debut novel “Everything Is Illuminated,” published his follow-up “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” His second novel was, on the one hand, the playful story of an unusually precocious and sensitive boy who invents fantastical devices, dreams about astrophysics, collects a vast assortment of random facts – and is compelled into a quixotic odyssey through the fabric of New York. At the same time, the novel was the first major literary exploration into the grief of 9/11 families, and a study of how a child’s imagination helps him navigate overwhelming fear and unfathomable loss in the wake of events that no logic could possibly reconcile.

When Stephen Daldry read the book, he was struck most of all by Oskar’s subjective point of view. An unusual child with arrestingly high intelligence yet eccentric and obsessive behaviors that might put him on the autistic spectrum, Oskar describes the world around him with his own particular mix of naiveté and insight, nervousness and boldness, incomprehension and a need to understand. Most of all, Daldry was intrigued by how this POV, just like a child’s imagination, combined random thoughts, flashes of memory, lists of ideas and impromptu fantasies with pure emotion – all at a moment when life has irrevocably changed for Oskar’s family and the world around him.

“I found it truly compelling that Jonathan Safran Foer told this story not only from the perspective of a boy enduring unimaginable heartbreak, but a boy who has his own singular view of everything,” says Daldry. “It’s a perspective that is engaging, inventive and emotionally rich.”

Oskar’s very personal experience of September 11th, and what came after, was brought to the fore in a screenplay adaptation by Eric Roth, who wanted to be true to the distinctive immediacy of Foer’s novel. “It’s a very emotional book and I hope it is a very emotional movie,” says Roth. “There’s also a real kinetic energy to the book – and the challenge was to translate that into visual imagery.”

The book wove many themes – of individual and national trauma, of childhood’s strangeness, of the nature of tragedy and the endurance of love through family hardship – into its tapestry. Each of those themes was key to the storytelling, but Roth found his way in through one particular element: the relationship between Oskar and his father, Thomas (Hanks), who is seen in the film entirely through Oskar’s subjective memories, which are in turn fueled by a confusing mixture of love, loss and lingering questions.

Oskar deeply misses his father’s so-called “reconnaissance expeditions,” clever puzzles that Thomas created for Oskar to solve, not only as inspired father-son games but also to help him engage with the world despite his social awkwardness. So when he finds the mysterious key in the bottom of a vase hidden in the dark recesses of his father’s closet, Oskar propels himself into a new mission to ferret out the key’s meaning.

His only clue to the key’s potential origins is the name “Black,” written on the envelope in which he found it, so Oskar dutifully makes an ambitious plan to visit all 472 people named Black in the New York City phone books, even though, according to the math, it will take him three years to do so.

Like many kids with gifted intelligence, high sensory sensitivity and impaired social skills, Oskar thrives on schedules, rules and facts yet his search takes him far from the predictable and the comfortable. But no matter what obstacles stand in his way, Oskar is determined to complete his task.

“Oskar is a kid who is different, but in a wonderful way,” notes Roth. “He might have a form of Asperger’s but he also has a great imagination and a real sense of curiosity along with his many fears. For a long time, he was kept afloat very much by his father who enjoyed so many similar things. So now, when Oskar finds his father’s key a year after his death, he believes it has to unlock something – a piece of advice, an object, some wisdom that his father left for him. And it leads him on an adventure that is his way of coming to terms with grief and all sorts of other things.”

As Roth began compacting Foer’s wide-ranging plot and finding the cinematic structure, he found Foer to be a supportive resource. “Jonathan is a wonderful novelist but my ability is to be a good dramatist and bring the work alive on the screen. He really trusted me in that process and we developed a very close and collaborative relationship.”

Adds Stephen Daldry: “Jonathan really understands the difference between a book and a script, and was very helpful. He never once uttered the phrase, ‘Well, in the book…’ He was always open to interpretation and reinvention.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Sneak Peek: TOM HANKS & SANDRA BULLOCK's “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

From three-time Academy Award® nominated director Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot,” “The Reader,” “The Hours”) comes the poignant drama “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

The Warner Bros. film stars Academy Award® winners Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump,” “Philadelphia”) and Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”) along with newcomer Thomas Horn in the role of Oskar, and was produced by Scott Rudin (“No Country for Old Men,” “The Social Network,” “True Grit”).

The screenplay is by Academy Award® winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider”), based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed bestseller.

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is a story that unfolds from inside the young mind of Oskar Schell, an inventive eleven year-old New Yorker whose discovery of a key in his deceased father’s belongings sets him off on an urgent search across the city for the lock it will open. A year after his father died in the World Trade Center on what Oskar calls “The Worst Day,” he is determined to keep his vital connection to the man who playfully cajoled him into confronting his wildest fears. Now, as Oskar crosses the five New York boroughs in quest of the missing lock – encountering an eclectic assortment of people who are each survivors in their own way – he begins to uncover unseen links to the father he misses, to the mother who seems so far away from him and to the whole noisy, dangerous, discombobulating world around him.

The film also stars Academy Award® nominees Max von Sydow (“Shutter Island,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Pelle the Conqueror”) and Viola Davis (“Doubt,” “The Help”), John Goodman, Jeffrey Wright and Zoe Caldwell.

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

 

Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock “EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE” trailer

Warner Bros. has just launched the first online trailer of its upcoming drama, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock.

Based on the acclaimed novel of the same name, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” tells the story of one young boy’s journey from heartbreaking loss to the healing power of self-discovery, set against the backdrop of the tragic events of September 11.

Eleven-year-old Oskar Schell is an exceptional child: amateur inventor, Francophile, pacifist. And after finding a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, he embarks on an exceptional journey—an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. As Oskar roams the city, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity, who are all survivors in their own ways. Ultimately, Oskar’s journey ends where it began, but with the solace of that most human experience: love.

Academy Award® nominee Stephen Daldry (“The Reader,” “The Hours”) directs “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” from a screenplay by Academy Award® winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider”), based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed novel. The film stars Academy Award® winners Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump,” “Philadelphia”) and Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”), and is being produced by Academy Award® winner Scott Rudin (“No Country for Old Men,” “The Social Network,” “True Grit”).

Opening across the Philippines in February 2012, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

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.

Completely unaware of the risks of such an enterprise despite living in one of the hotbeds of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter puts the lives of maids in jeopardy just to please a scabrous New York Jewish elite editor—no commas because Taylor/Stockett seem to use each of these terms as if they all mean the same thing—named Elaine Stein (Mary Steenburgen, who somehow gives the most one-note performance in a film of unambiguous heroes and villains). For some reason, Stein is never shown sitting at her desk like a professional, instead lounging on the thing dangling her legs like a naughty secretary or brashly calling from a restaurant whilst devouring adoring younger men. Mocking the ivory tower insularity of the New England elites, both Stockett and Taylor have her flippantly telling Skeeter to hurry up and get the interviews she needs for a book "before this whole civil rights thing blows over."

The rest of the archetypes are spread out among dignified, frumpy sexless (yet child-inundated) maids and shrieking housewives who put a glossed look on racism so audiences don't have to be reminded that some of their parents (or even friends) used to beat and hang people for the color of their skin. This brigade of over-hairsprayed, overacting harridans is led by Hilly Holbrook, played by a Bryce Dallas Howard with such narrowed eyes there simply must be a gag reel of her walking into furniture by mistake. One never gets any clue as to why Skeeter was ever such close friends with her or Elizabeth (Ahna O'Reilly), a lab-grown Betty Draper cloned with amphibian DNA to fill the sequence gaps. But then, Skeeter herself is such a blank slate for the author's guilt and wish fulfillment that presumably anyone could find something to project in her.

As for the maids, Aibileen is the chief representative, but she is also joined by Minny, de-sassed from her ludicrous novel form into someone who might conceivably have lived past the age of 13 in a town where lip from a black woman could equal jail time at best. Stockett wrote the character with her actor friend Octavia Spencer in mind, and Spencer plays the role here. Her bug eyes are their own punchline, always bulging in anticipation of reprisal when she can't keep her mouth shut and regarding any and all white people with disbelief, as if unable to comprehend just how ridiculous they are. Minny is the most anachronistic element in this story, modeled after a modern, no-nonsense black woman, but now that Spencer can say the lines instead of Stockett writing in loose dialect, she nearly makes the thin comic relief of the character work. She shares some organic laughs with Aibileen that work far better than the more staged comic pieces, precisely because these smaller, more intimate moments feel like conceivable gallows humor between two people suffering through the same endless torment.

Nevertheless, Minny's neutering makes her extraneous, and the already unnecessary side-plot with her airheaded but sweet new boss, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), only more distracting. I would venture to guess that Stockett intended Celia's character to comment on how much poor whites shared with blacks in their ostracizing from the realm of "classy" whites, but her depiction as a kindhearted, racially blind piece of "white trash" is antithetical to the true, vile nature of racism among poor, which is almost always more vicious for the jealousy and resentment of being in the same financial bracket as minorities. Having said that, Chastain gives as good a performance as the two black leads with her equally limited role: virtually unrecognizable from her turn earlier this year as the embodiment of human spirit in The Tree of Life, Chastain speaks with a squeaky hiss that sounds as if the air for her words came not from her lungs but wind blowing through the empty space between her ears and out her mouth and nostrils. She couldn't be any further from her other breakout role this year, and the sheer range she's shown within releases spaced apart by mere months is, one hopes, a sign of stardom to come.

Much talk has already circulated regarding the awards potential of Davis' performance, and it's true that she makes a startling presence. Confined by Stockett's conception of Aibileen as a loving maid who seemingly exists to raise and cheer up white babies, Davis nevertheless injects steel into the character. She's no more complex a character, but Davis' fearsome visage etches pain on this glorified Mammy figure. If anything, she conveys too much strength to be taken seriously as a humble, submissive domestic: there's more fire in her face than Spencer's. When one looks into those hardened eyes, however, one can also find humor and love, and if she has to play a maid who, in one way or another, always gives of herself to a white person, at least Davis makes that role almost believable on a human level.

I mention all these actresses because there are some genuinely solid performances here. While the Stepford women of Jackson shriek and scream and hiss, depicting racism as a matter of peer pressure instead of an endemic social ill, Spencer, Davis and Chastain elevate a film that doesn't deserve them. But not even they can distract from the shortcuts and stereotypes thrown at the screen for easy identification. Skeeter's mother, an imperious yet unchallenged force in the book, is here softened by Allison Janney. Taylor condenses the gradual progression of Charlotte's illness into a single line, and I must say that "My daughter's upset my cancerous ulcers!" is my favorite non-sequitur, crass exploitation of a terminal disease since "I got the results of the test back, I definitely have breast cancer." Skeeter too finds the shortest distance to her moral awakening, openly sniping Hilly from the start and eroding any plausibility of her supposedly close friendship with Jackson's resident witch. Skeeter's arc revolves around the mystery of what happened to her loving maid Constantine, who disappeared just before the young woman returned from college, and we're meant to track her moral development through this uncooked subplot that serves only to not-really drive a wedge between mother and daughter.

Constantine is the downfall of both the novel and the film. A repository for Stockett's idealized memories of her own maid, Demetrie, Constantine appears in flashbacks that reduce the woman to an utter fabrication, Aibileen without the tangibility. My mouth actually fell open in horror at seeing Cicely Tyson, an icon, simply appear to a teenage Skeeter, so rail-thin, shriveled and toothless that she resembled less a human being with her own life and story than a savior version of Baron Samedi. Constantine exists solely for beatification, despite how little say she gets in literary or cinematic form. All she does is buck up Skeeter, which Stockett interprets as true motherly love. Hilariously, she gave an interview in which she admitted that, when she spoke to white families that used to have a maid, they remembered the workers with fondness and love. But when it came to the maids, well, let's take a look: "When I spoke to black people it was surprising to see how removed they were emotionally from those they worked for. That was not always the case, but it was one of the dynamics that struck me. Sometimes it was a total disregard. It was just a job."

The interviewer, of course, didn't press this, but the question arises: did Demetrie truly love young Kathryn, who incidentally grew up in the '70s and '80s despite people passing this book off as autobiography? I would love to know if, at any moment, Stockett remotely entertained the possibility that the maid she has placed on a pedestal for raising her, for empathizing with her, really just viewed her as a job to make oppressive wages to feed her own children. I think that she did, in some dark recess of her mind, and the result is Constantine, a icon carved out of blessed wood that Stockett uses to chase such life-altering thoughts away like a broom to a raccoon. The resolution of Constantine's fate in the novel is overwrought, but it at least cast Skeeter's mother as a more accurate face of racism than the sparkle-bright young ladies of the Junior League, revealing how nearly three decades of service and invaluable contributions could not stop a white person from acting with cold impersonality. The film, however, recasts the revelation with regret on behalf of Charlotte, and she and Skeeter suffer no fallout or profound change for it. It's just there for another tearjerker in another film that makes so many intervallic leaps between cutesy comedy and shameless manipulation it feels like a bebopification of sentimentality.

And so, the film resolves itself for maximum audience pleasure: Hilly turns into a dozen crows that scatter into the winds, Muggles and wizards learn to live in harmony, and a baby named Barack raises his tiny, large-eared head in Hawaii and coos the word "Change." Stein, who exists to be a hard-ass to Skeeter (and an inconsistent one, first aware of the risks facing maids and then expecting more than a dozen interviews later), somehow lets Skeeter's book be released with the most hysterically dumb cover I've ever seen. The baby blue cover sports only a dove as its centerpiece, halfheartedly justified as being linked to the budding hippie movement. I just found it amusing that even the goddamned object on the book cover is white.

The Help, even in its semi-ambiguous novel form, cocoons open racism as a thing of the past. It doesn't say that racism is over, per se, but it clearly wants us to admire how far we've come. But when Jackson only recently found itself the subject of another high-profile case of race violence—in this case the murder of a black man by racist teens who shouted "White power!" as they beat him and ran over him in a truck—maybe we shouldn't be so aghast at how things "used" to be. But no, we are instead treated to the running joke of Minny's revenge against Hilly, a dastardly deed involving a pie and a mounting sense of dread, not in the reveal but in the dawning realization that this work really will sink so low for a laugh. Naturally, it works as a crowd-pleaser, but it is so insipidly dumb, Stockett writing herself out of the true conclusion to it (and the release of Skeeter's book itself) with the threat of mutually assured social destruction. But do you know how that story really ends? It doesn't end with Minny in prison where she can tell the world of Hilly: it ends with her being killed and her house firebombed. Those might not even be two separate actions. It ends with Aibileen not simply fired but completely stripped of what little she has and possibly the target of violence. It ends with Skeeter mostly likely being raped for being a race traitor and definitely with her family crippled economically. These are not pleasant endings, and I do not "want" to see them, at least in the sense that I would ever like to spend an evening seeing such sights. But if you're going to make a film about '60s Jackson, you should show the truth, not what will only unsettle audiences in the safest way possible.

So what, in the end, are we left with? A movie that hinges its biggest payoff on a flight of pure revisionist fantasy designed to make modern audiences feel good about themselves, complete with emotional moments that are, in almost every occurrence, tied to a black person helping a white. Whether it is Aibileen's insulting "You is kind, you is smart" speech to little Mae Mobley, the maids agreeing to speak after Hilly crosses the line (their assent delivered with a collective "mmm-hmm" that throbs through Aibileen's house like an A/C unit switching on), and finally the dénouement of the two supposedly lead black maids stopping everything to cheerlead Skeeter getting a job. This trivialization of the '60s has been defended for its nonsensical feel-good whimsy by those who feel validated for having a cry over these prop cutouts of suffering. But those looking for a genuinely inspiring story of overcoming hardships associated with the racial serfdom that persists today—a recent Pew Research Center release showed the median net worth of a white household at 20 times that of a black family—should read this account of a conversation the daughter of a maid had with the grown-up child of the family that employed her. It's heartbreaking, enraging, unexpectedly uplifting, defiantly confrontational, and it ends with a punchline that is not only earned but truly hilarious and vindicating. In other words, it's everything The Help isn't.