Smart about Race

So, on the way back from Chicago this summer, Julien, Becky and I were talking about The Help. The movie hadn't been released yet, but both Becky and I were skeptical. Julien asked about our skepticism. Do you think the movie will be racist?

The point, I said, was not that the movie would be racist. Most everything is racist. Hollywood itself, for that matter. But when I think about films, I told Julien that I think some films are smart about race and some films are stupid about race. I assumed from the trailer that The Help would be stupid about race.

I was right. The Help is actually extremely stupid about race. From its total ignorance about the state terror under which black people lived (and continue to live) in the South to its insistence on black women's love for the white children they're forced to raise to the almost total absence of black men in the film to the humorous way The Help deals with black women's fear of white men, The Help is just dumb about race.

Any film with a magic negro in it falls in the category dumb-about-race for me.

But all this got the three of us to thinking about what films are smart about race. I might need some feedback on this. I could not think of that many. These are the films I could think of:

Two films by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck: Sugar and Half Nelson. The first is about a baseball player from the Dominican Republic who comes to the U.S. and is transplanted to a midwest farm team. The second is about a teacher who is addicted to crack. Half Nelson in particular taught me about my own racist prejudices when I watch a film. That film stars Ryan Gosling and Anthony Mackie. So good.

I also recently watched the film Claudine from 1974 with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones and found it funny and moving and extremely smart about race.

I always thought Monster's Ball was pretty smart about race, too, but it's been a while since I saw it, so I can't remember that all that well.

Of the films I've seen in the last ten years:
Precious.
The Class.
The Visitor.
The Last King of Scotland.
Caché.
Junebug.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
Dirty Pretty Things.
Raising Victor Vargas.

There are probably a couple more that I am missing here. Anyhow, the point is: the list as such is not very long.

Thoughts?

The Class

I finally saw last year's Cannes winner Entre les Murs (The Class). And I loved it.

The reason it took me so long to sit down and pop this DVD in is that I thought The Class was gonna be one of those good-white-teacher-comes-into-troubled-area-with-lots-of-urban-kids dramas that purport to be inspirational but are actually predictable, tiresome, clichéd, and almost always more than a little racist.

The Class isn't any of those things. In fact, The Class is profound. It's about education in France and the real struggles that teachers go through. It's also about the fundamental quandaries of education: like the power differential inherent in the very model of pedagogy, and the question of why students should learn the things we want to teach them.

This movie is totally fascinating. There are protracted sequences where we literally just watch François Bégaudeau teach a class of students about verb tenses or Anne Frank. And you might think these sequences would be boring. They're not. They are positively riveting. The teacher goes from question to question answering, helping, assisting the students in their own teaching. It's superb, really.

I know this movie is a year old and I am sorry it has taken me so long to get to it. I loved The Class so much that I am moving it to #4 on my list for 2008.