I saw the movie this week and I enjoyed it. I'm usually pretty sensitive to racial issues (though I am by NO MEANS perfect or free of bias or anything like that so take all this as TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE and also probably steeped in privilege
) and the movie didn't hit any alarm bells for me.
Yes, there is a white protagonist, but considering that the movie is about a book being published about black womens' experiences during the Civil Rights movement, I think it would have been unrealistic for there
not to have been a white go-between acting to funnel the stories from the actual women who experienced them to the publisher who otherwise wouldn't have given them the time of day. The movie (imho) makes it very clear that the white protagonist is there simply as that go-between and really nothing else -- she's not a savior, and she actually fades into the background in many (most?) scenes in the second half.
I do understand the point that the movie didn't go far enough to portray, say, the sexual harassment and rape that many housekeepers faced on a daily basis. But I do think that the movie strongly implies that many of the "background" stories (dozens of women are interviewed and we don't see ALL those stories) are darker than the foreground stories. I think the movie was trying to walk the line between "get people in the audience who might otherwise not come to a 'dark' film" and "don't whitewash everything in happy fun times". I felt like the movie succeeded, but that's my subjective opinion.
One of the things I REALLY liked about the movie was that racism wasn't portrayed as something everyone just "got over" by the end of the film. Pretty much everyone who starts out the movie as a racist ends the movie as a racist, and it's clear that no matter how "soft" or "private" their racism is, it's NOT okay or healthy or going to go away on its own. In some ways, for me, that made the film a lot more darker than if they had put in "heavier" material and made all the 'racists' obvious cookie-cut strawmen that most people can congratulate themselves on not being.
As for the film acting like black women love to raise white babies... I didn't see it. There's at least one interview and I think two where it's stated right out that house work was the ONLY job open to the black women at the time, and so it's clearly a job of necessity and not because they like being nannies. Only two of the women in the movie are shown liking their charges, and even then they seem less to
like the children and more to identify with them as a disenfranchised member of society (i.e., the little girls are fat/ugly and the mothers are mean as a result). I didn't see it as a "black women love babies" thing but rather more of a "these particular women have experienced a crap life and are sad to see that someone else will also have a crap life". But that was my take on it, anyway.
Well, that's my two cents, anyway. 4 stars from Ana.
Please return to the ZOMBIE DEAD HORSE mobi/epub thing. I'm an epub user myself, but I'll switch to mobi if everyone will shut up forever on this topic. *sigh*