Prestige Be Damned, The Help‘s Tate Taylor Should Keep Making Star Vehicles For Character Actresses

Ultimately, Sue sounds more complicated than she really is, just as Chastain’s high-powered super-assassin from Ava has more tortured backstory than genuine inner life. Part of the trouble is that Taylor is pretty bad at staging the stuff his characters actually do, especially when it comes to physical violence, which didn’t really play into The Help. Despite Chastain’s general commitment, her acrobatics during various fights and shoot-outs in Ava sometimes look hilariously unconvincing, as if choreographed around certain immovable routines that she couldn’t master. In Yuba County, Taylor seems to understand that Fargo-like movies often include unexpected bursts of violence, and he crams them all together into the last 20 minutes or so, like knocking over a vase a few seconds before jumping out and shouting “surprise!” Ma has a mid-movie murder scene that has almost no bearing on the plot, happens brusquely and is never mentioned again by anyone.

Ma, which Tate Taylor has talked about sequelizing, is also the closest that one of these movies has come to really working. Its small-town grudges feel relatively lived-in, and Spencer does uncommonly well with the Tate Taylor special: Rolling an uncomfortable mix of tones into a performance that walks the line between touchingly sincere and laughably ridiculous. Her woundedness at abuse suffered as a shy teenager and pride in briefly providing a strange friendship to a group of cool teenagers (and the children of some former tormentors) shares common ground with Janney’s character in Yuba; they’re even both named Sue. More so than Janney, Spencer restrains herself from going full-on cartoon. She turns her Sue into a borderline great part for a longtime character actor, who would be frequently relegated to playing mentors and best friends even after winning an Oscar (and getting nominated for two more).

Even Ma, though, has a weirdly unacknowledged racial component—something else Taylor carries over to Breaking News in Yuba County, which recruits several more actors who might turn up in future Tate Taylor films: The great Regina Hall as the cop who doesn’t trust Sue, Awkwafina as an intimidating criminal enforcer, Samira Wiley as the pregnant wife of Sue’s ex-con brother-in-law (Jimmi Simpson) and Wanda Sykes as the ex-con’s bored boss. This looks like an object lesson in casting with an eye toward uncommented-upon diversity. Yet in a movie that aims for social satire, there surely are racial dynamics in a Black woman cop pursuing a mild-acting white woman, or an Asian-American woman (and her Asian-American father) working as part of a major criminal enterprise, or any number of situations that Taylor appears to consider addressed by giving Regina Hall a wan, under-her-breath crack about white people. A more subtle filmmaker could lay claim to concealing these tensions under the surface of a genre-first story. Taylor, you may recall, made The Help, and as such has no grounds for such a claim.

By wading into questionable racial politics and paying loving attention to the careers of his favorite, oft-underappreciated actors, all in service of bizarre genre remixes, Tate Taylor has become something like a normcore Tarantino. If Tarantino makes movies while flipping through a mental rolodex of his every cinematic experience, Taylor seems to make them while flipping through his actual rolodex, leaving his understanding of movie genres themselves half-formed. (Maybe that’s why Ma has a couple of split diopter shots; the whole thing feels a bit like Taylor trying to square the story’s outline with his vague memory of Carrie.) There’s also the whole issue of technical mastery, which, again, has mostly eluded Taylor—his movies still look enough like low-rent direct-to-streaming titles that that’s more or less how they’ve been released, despite Ma being a hit in 2019. (Yuba County and Ava both had selective theatrical engagements; the real tell is how sparsely they were screened for critics.)

Yet there is something fascinating about Taylor’s work, even when it borders on incompetence. His recent movies are junky in ways that, intentionally or not, rebuke the prestige-picture pomp of The Help. That movie centers a story of racism on young, white Emma Stone—a wonderful actress adrift in the movie’s awkward halfway point between the white-savior narratives of the past and the more nuanced work that goes into the performances from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. Taylor’s later work suggests that he may have learned something from that pitfall—if not necessarily all of The Help’s failings. His work still gingerly sidesteps difficult conversations about race more often than not, but his eye has traveled away from typical star turns (Chastain, the white lady at the center of Ava, is at least fraught with guilt) and his movies maintain a palpable interest in actors who aren’t always thought of as obvious leads in contemporary Hollywood.

Taylor’s affection can still curdle, as with Yuba County, which may tee up future vehicles for Awkwafina or Regina Hall, but guides them to bad performances in the meantime. He may continue to make movies, like The Girl on the Train, that call out for someone like Brian De Palma to make them better. But if Tate Taylor feels more at home making Ava or Ma than The Help, I’m not one to argue. It’s a minor relief, seeing a filmmaker politely opt out of prestige. If Taylor hasn’t fully resolved his “actor’s director” chumminess with the darker side of human nature, at least he doesn’t seem hellbent on getting Oscars for his effort.

Jesse Hassenger writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including The A.V. Club, Polygon, The Week, NME, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching, listening to, or eating.