Educational Media Reviews Online

Alice Walker: “Everyday Use” is a dramatization of Alice Walker’s 1973 short story of the same name. The film is one half of a two-part series entitled Alice Walker: Everyday Use, Uncommon Art, which also includes an interview with Walker (An Interview with Alice Walker) in which she discusses the writing of her story. I haven’t seen An Interview with Alice Walker, and so this review focuses solely upon the dramatization of “Everyday Use.”

Alice Walker: “Everyday Use” is a well-made four-hander. It does more than simply transpose Walker’s story to the screen. While remaining more or less true to the story, Alice Walker: “Everyday Use” also pursues its own artistic goals. The film’s use of voiceover mirrors the story’s first-person narration (and so Mama’s perception of her two daughters remains at the core of the story) and the film both preserves and sharpens the conflicts among characters. At the same time, some of the characters have been changed slightly to give the film a stronger sense of plot than Walker’s story. Schwartz accomplishes this by twice delaying the revelation of information to the viewer that Walker makes available to the reader right from the start. In the opening lines of the short story, Walker’s Mama already feels animosity toward Dee, and so the story is on one level a playing-out of that animosity: Dee finally pushes Mama too far, and Mama declares her sympathy for her shy younger daughter, Maggie. The film, by contrast, begins with Mama’s great delight at Dee’s proposed visit home, and Mama is first confused and then irritated by Dee’s superior attitude toward her family. In the film, therefore, Mama learns something she didn’t know about her daughter, and her realization of and reaction to that new knowledge drive the plot.

Also, Walker makes it clear to the reader from the start that Maggie will not be at ease until Dee has finished her visit. Schwartz, on the other hand, does not immediately explain Maggie’s initial reaction to her sister’s proposed visit – we see her crying in a dark corner of the house – leaving another mystery to be cleared, slowly, as the film progresses.

In addition to these changes, Walker’s Mama is much stronger than Schwartz’s Mama. The Mama of the short story is a big, strong woman who can work outdoors in the winter without feeling the cold, who can kill and clean hogs “as mercilessly as a man.” These details have been dropped from Schwartz’s film, and the resulting Mama is a less imposing woman who needs help getting out of her chair, and who is initially charmed by Dee before refusing her request for the old family quilts.

And so the film has a slightly more defined sense of progression than Walker’s story, which itself is mainly concerned with describing a situation and its inherent conflicts. Because the film makes these subtle changes to Walker’s story without deviating from it too far, it would serve as a useful classroom tool for the exploration of plot development and characterization.

The quality of the film is reasonably high. The set is authentic, the acting is good, the pacing is relaxed without dragging, and the film quietly preserves many of Walker’s important details about costumes and setting (Dee’s painfully bright dress and oversized sunglasses, the swept yard in front of Mama’s house, the worn handle on the butter churn). Some of the scenes are marred by the sort of long pauses filled with meaningful glances that one is wont to find in short story adaptations. But above all, there is a sense that Schwartz understands Walker’s story, and that’s perhaps the best reason for recommending this film.