1992. Directed by Curtis Hanson. Written by Amanda Silver.
(Spoilers for the beginning of the movie.) The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which could have easily been titled
LOL White People, shows a richy rich Seattle family just struggling to build a fence to keep the undesirables out. Really, their lives were going fine until...
Ahhh! A black guy!
It's okay, though. He's retarded, and thus not a threat.
The lady up there is Claire (Annabella Sciorra), and she's all kindsa pregnant. So, she goes to the gyno...
It's Q! And he's here to seem creepy. Claire, who fears all, decides he was molesting her during her exam. Maybe he was. It's unclear. I mean, with the camera angles and music, we're really looking at the situation through the filter of Claire's paranoia.
After Claire's accusations, Dr. Q offs himself. And his wife, Mrs. Dr. Q, played by Rebecca De Mornay, decides to take her revenge on Claire and her family by becoming their perfect Aryan nanny.
She moves in and starts a race war against Solomon, the retarded black fix-it man. In the above image, Solomon shakes her hand, and she gets super angry because he smudges his blackness on her. Nooooooooooo.
Did you know that Julianne Moore is in this? Badass.
More badass.
So, the question at the end: Is
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle a document of early-90s race fail, or is it actually an indictment of upper-middle class isolationism? I think... that it's probably more of the latter but still a bit of the former. Anyone who is paying attention will see that this horror scenario is launched through the family's fear-driven interaction with the world. But the movie still plays to an audience of similarly-minded people, counting on them identifying with Claire and her family and rooting for their triumph over the evil that lurks outside their fence.
It's kind of a fascinating film. If I were teaching a course on Bush-era America,
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle would be a perfect inclusion.
Thanks a lot for this dictation, smirnoff. I did enjoy watching it very much. In no way would I mean for this review to discourage anyone from seeing it. It would make a great double feature with
Sleeping with the Enemy. So much popcorn.
By the way, smirnoff's runner-up choice was
Tremors, which is playing in theatre here on Wednesday. In theatre!! I'm going to try to make it over there, and, if I do, I'll probably put that review up in this thread too.