Can't get past the racism

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2005)

Okay, I know it's supposed to be one of the all time epic movie masterpieces, but is it really that good? I'll give the characters a two-dimensionality - barely - but they all play through to type. You can argue it doesn't matter with this movie, that film doesn't have the same responsibility as a novel to explore the nuances of its characters' emotions. But if a film is going to make a claim to be one of the greatest all time, it should show some greater development than Scarlett turning into a spunky survivor. Ultimately, I know the movie is beautifully done with many wonderful scenes, but it's an exercise in sentimental glorification of a world that was far more brutal, ugly, and hollow than the film even hints at. I don't expect a cinematic monograph on the evils of plantation society from a 1939 Hollywood epic, but I also don't have to swallow its assumptions wholesale. The gentility moaning away on their soulless spirituals recalls the "pastoral scene of the gallant south" that Billie Holiday sang of in her anti-lynching song, "Strange Fruit". The irony is that the lynchings didn't simply date from the Civil War era in which the film takes place, but from the very year and decade in which the film was made and released. So sorry, I give it a 6 for all it does so well, but thematically it has aged very poorly.