Daisy says Hoke is her best friend, but I doubt she was his best friend. She repeatedly demonstrated that she didn't see him as her equal: ordering him to drive instead of urinate, refusing to share the MLK ticket with him, etc. At the end he's feeding her because she can't do it for herself.
I suspect that if the film were told from his point of view we'd have a different story.
It was a different time, and the filmmakers...I believe...were trying to portray story realistically for it's time frame. IMO, they succeeded.
The bad news is you have houseguests. There is no good news.
It has less to do with racism and more to do with how employers treated employees in those days. (And still do in some places.)
Hoke is an employee, and not one she even wanted. The breaking down of barriers of class, gender, religion, (and race too I don't deny), is the core of the story. Paralleling this is the decades long decline into dependence of a fiercely independent woman and her slow acceptance of this. The final scene where she is being spoon fed, and contentedly, takes us the full journey. Pun intended.
Could the film have been made with a white driver with minimal loss of integrity? Absolutely. But to have not done so would have been to miss a valuable and important dynamic. It doesn't follow that this is a film about race.
Liberal racism is the most insidious kind. It allows people to look at racism in the face and come up with all kinds of euphemisms and excuses to describe it like "that's just how it was back then" or "the slaves were happy" or "their lives would have been worse if they stayed in africa" and that's just "how employers treated employees those days." Just because it was how things were done doesn't mean it wasn't racism.
sharePersonally, I'm not sure what politics ("liberal racism," as you describe it) has to do with racism because I've heard all kinds of people (liberal, conservative, whatever) use the excuses you cite. Obviously, in all of the years of slavery and segregation, enough people convinced themselves the status of African-Americans was okay. As a Black man, I can say it's never mattered to me what form racism has come in. Is one form supposed to be more hurtful than another?
shareI don't think I said one was a worse or better form of racism. I said it is "insidious" meaning that it's harmful in a sneaky way. It's easy to overlook it if you are conditioned not to recognize it.
shareYou noticed societal/interpersonal/racial differences in a relationship between a uneducated, poor,black chauffeur & his rich, white, genteel employers - set in the Deep South circa 1940-60's??
Impressive
Cheers
Amen...
shareShe repeatedly demonstrated that she didn't see him as her equal
Sista's just looking for reasons to hate whitey. Too bad her chronic bitterness kept her from appreciating a truly fine film.
shareOne day this country is going to realize there is a vast difference between the term "racism", which most people are wrongly accused of, and the term "prejudice", which is feeling a varying degree of disdain for someone whose actions infringe on another's ability to exist in an acceptable manner of their own choosing; a feeling which has nothing to do with the offending person's skin tone.
And before you rush to disagree and use phrases you've cut and pasted from someone else with no understanding of their meaning, I suggest you again read what I wrote this time attempting to comprehend my point.
Unacceptable speech, behavior and/or the lack of respect for another's existence on this earth isn't limited to one certain race of people. Each group has it's less than desirable elements, and it is those individuals comprising the "less than desirable" segments whom I'm "prejudiced" against.
Sorry but your paternalism in an attempt to correct Negroes in their perceptions is pure bullshi*t and as always condescending. No one needs you correcting them about what's its like to be black living ina racist country like America. Save that for your white brethren while your convince yourselves racism, slavery, Jim Crow, bigotry, and discrimination don't exist. Your response is so common, toy just had to cut and paste it from StormFront our Breitbart "news". White prime always pontificating and correcting everyone else. The OPs observations and comments are spot on. I hated this movie - by whites, for whites. Ironically I'm writing this while I'm being driven to a theater to see this play which has been told over and over and over again so whites can feel better about themselves. I guess my husband has no idea how I feel about these kinds of movies. I'll probably be the only black person in the damned audience.
shareKeep in mind that this movie is biographical, about Alfred Uhry's actual family. (He had an aunt or something, that was the real-life model for Miss Daisy, and she had a black chaueffer, just like Daisy did.)
How much of it was made up for the sake of cinema isn't clear, but it can't be too far off what life was like in the rural South in the 40s. That is the impression I get.
Yes, listening to the commentary, Uhry talks about how this was based on his grandmother and her driver and how they interacted together. There was a deliberate effort not to try and "modernize how people thought. I wanted to write about how people thought then."
And apparently, Arthur Ashe (the tennis player) came up to Uhry once and said, "You've written about my father. And if it weren't for my father and my grandfather having service jobs like that, they wouldn't have provided the opportunity for me to become what I am. And I thank you."
Board with Signatures...
She repeatedly demonstrated that she didn't see him as her equal
suspect that if the film were told from his point of view
Who cares? This is not a discussion about how whites treat Jews.
shareNear the beginning of the story, Daisy never would have said Hoke was her best friend, because she was very prejudiced, as much as she tried to pretend she wasn't. The whole point of the story is her change of heart. At the beginning, she was quite unkind; she didn't think of Hoke as an equal or treat him like one. By the time she says, "you're my best friend", he had won her over. And while the story wasn't necessarily told from Hoke's point of view, it certainly wasn't told from Daisy's because right from the beginning we're meant to view Daisy as being unreasonable in her dislike of Hoke.
shareJust to add to what's been said above let me say that while I believe Daisy meant it when she said Hoke was her best friend, there was a bit of irony in it.
Hoke was her best friend at that point. She was older, she lost most of her close friends, and her best friend now was a person she wasn't always good to, particularly earlier in their relationship.
To her credit, she changed her point of view and they did indeed become friends.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men ~ F Douglassshare
Reminds me of that George Wallace scene I'm the movie about him when he's being put into a tub worth his now shriveled pathetic legs to be bathed by his black caretaker.
We're always white peoples best friends when their white friends and family aren't around, we're cleaning their soiled behinds because their very same white friends and family have abandoned them, orthey're drunk.
We're always white peoples best friends when their white friends and family aren't around, we're cleaning their soiled behinds because their very same white friends and family have abandoned them, orthey're drunk.