The Help is not a great film, but it is an important one. To be sure, it's not a hard-hitting or complex picture of racial relations, nor does it seek to be. It chooses to be a Hollywood movie, with clear-cut heroes and villains, comic relief and drama. Though it doesn't cut as deep as we've come to expect a film about racial tension to do, it is nonetheless a jarring reminder of the relative youth of the Civil Rights Movement. It takes place in 1963 Mississippi--less than fifty years ago and in a recognizable America--but considering the racial relations it may as well have been Civil War-era. Black people were still bullied out of the voting booth, sent to separate schools, even forbidden from talking to white people at times. Again: less than fifty years ago.
The Help tells the story of the beginning of the turning of the tide. While segregation still holds and the community of Jackson, Miss., still suffers under Jim Crow, Martin Luther King is marching on Washington and planting the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. In the meantime, a plucky young college graduate named Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns to Jackson hoping to become a journalist, though she settles for a job as housekeeping advice columnist for the local newspaper.
Not knowing much about housekeeping, she asks her friend's housemaid Aibileen (Viola Davis) for help. Stricken by how Aibileen is treated, Skeeter soon wants to know more about her side of the story: something which most of the white community of Jackson could not care less about. She begins to compile Aibileen's and other black women's stories into a book, "The Help."
Critics of the film have written it off as a white-woman-saves-all-the-black-people story, as though all the black community needed was one nice white person to lead them to victory. This is missing the point. The movie is more about the beginnings of change in America; Skeeter's interest in the "help's" side of the story parallels the nation's gravitation away from casual ignorance and toward equal rights.
Viola Davis owns the film as Aibileen. The movie's biggest discovery--which not many movies have touched on before--is that black housemaids were often more than simple house help, but also mothers to the children of their employers. Davis perfectly captures a woman disenchanted by her mistreatment, but torn by her genuine love for the little girl she's been taking care of. Octavia Spencer is also dynamic as fellow housemaid Minny, and her scenes with her new employer, an outcast socialite named Celia (Jessica Chastain), are quite moving.
The movie's Hollywood conventions do get the better of it at times. Though Stone is very good, the movie poses too much interest in her character; though her relationship with the maid that raised her (Cicely Tyson, who's magnificent) is central to the story, I have to confess I didn't much care about Skeeter's romantic sub-plot. The movie continues to reintroduce a boring love interest (Chris Lowell) when he might just as well have been dismissed.
The movie's arch villain, a snippy little housewife named Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) is so dastardly as to be inhuman. Hilly is nasty to her maids, nasty to her friends, and does everything short of twirl a mustache to signify that she is evil. It's to Howard's credit that the character is chilling rather than silly. Sissy Spacek gives a good performance as Hilly's senile mother, though in an otherwise highbrow movie her character seems to have graduated from the Adam Sandler School for Funky Grandmas.
Though it has its shortfalls as a major studio release, The Help is still an honest and affecting film. As a Hollywood film, it's less daring than an independent film might have been, and falls easily into convention. But the movie still has a compelling story to tell, and the performances by Davis, Spencer, Tyson, and Chastain are completely authentic. It was a crime that Davis did not win the Oscar for Doubt, and if she does not win this year, it will be a crime again.
*** 1/2 out of ****
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