The Help Reviews (2011)

I walked into The Help knowing that it was based on a book, but for the life of me I thought it was a nonfiction work, some product of interviews with former Mississippi maids who told their life stories to a journalist who dutifully reported the pains and heartaches that life in a deeply racist society had caused them. In actuality, it’s based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett; a novel that may have been based on her own experiences growing up in the deep South, but a novel nonetheless. As such, it seems almost less like authentic history than just...a story. It’s an affecting story, with at least one performance that we’ll be hearing more about when awards season rolls around, but the relentless simplifications of one of America’s most shameful decades doesn’t do the film, or its subject matter, much credit. This is history, Gumpified.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have cogent things to say about America’s ingrained history of racism, even if it spans only a few months in the life of Jackson, Mississippi, a town where black maids service the households of white women six days a week for less than minimum wage and precisely zero job security. The notion of "separate but equal" pervades the town’s services and especially its society; the maids gossip amongst themselves in kitchens while their employers titter over hands of bridge. It’s the way things have always been done, perhaps, but, as symbolized by a bout of bad weather, things are going to change, despite the best wishes of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, showing a bitchy side of herself that’s engagingly off-putting), a vacuous, vain harpy of a woman who lords over the genteel society ladies and refuses to use the same restrooms as the black women, claiming that “they have different different diseases from us.”

While the rest of the society ladies of Jackson seem to either be under Hilly’s thrall, or at least willing to go along to get along (Hilly’s expulsion of a woman from her group effectively results in complete social isolation), the film’s hero, Skeeter (Emma Stone), is propelled into the role of white knight by the mistreatment of her own former maid, Constantine, the woman who effectively raised her but was fired by her mother while Skeeter was away at college. A not-yet-journalist, Skeeter makes it her goal to take down the stories of the help, women who are kept docile and in their place by the threat of being blacklisted from their only available avenue of employment should they step out of line, not to mention the endemic racism that they live with every day.

What follows are clandestine meetings, secret conversations, and personal accounts attributed to anonymous sources, as Skeeter compiles a book-length exposé of the racial politics behind the employment of maids in Jackson. Her primary subject is Aibileen (Viola Davis), a stalwart maid who channels her grief over the death of her son into raising the semi-neglected children of her employer as best she can, telling her young ward every time she sees her: “You is kind, you is smart, you is important!” Poor conjugation aside, Davis owns this movie; it’s a deeply heartfelt performance, nuanced and full, and refreshingly free of any Oscar-baiting speeches. She’s an actress who can cry on command and make you feel less like she’s showing off than simply feeling everything that her character would; she can be humorous and genuinely funny without pandering. It’s a fierce piece of work and one of the best performances of the year.

Luckily, the rest of the cast doesn’t ebb the energy to any great degree: Dallas Howard makes the most of an unforgiving role; Jessica Chastain is almost unrecognizable (in a good way), if you last saw her in The Tree Of Life, as an outcast socialite who’s somehow so ignorant she loops back around into not knowing that she shouldn’t treat her maid like a human being; Sissy Spacek gets to play the comic relief as a dotty old woman who doesn’t know where she is half the time. Stone, as the centerpiece of the film, is asked to do little but appear plucky as a kid reporter or pensive when she realizes that her book might wind up causing serious complications for her subjects in an era when people are being killed for speaking out against racism, but she at least has endless amounts of pluck to draw from. (And, seriously, between this and Easy A, can we stop casting Emma Stone in the "unpopular, unattractive girl who can't get a date" roles?) Octavia Spencer, as Aibileen’s best friend Minny, is asked to do an almost more difficult thing than Davis is, as she careens wildly between showing indignant rage at the treatment of her fellow maids and popping up with a funny face or sassy put-down to an employer.

It’s these tonal shifts that I found difficult to deal with; the deaths of Medgar Evers and the travails of the Freedom Riders are dismissed in minutes, while copious amounts of time are spent on sub-plots such as Skeeter’s dalliance with an oil worker or Minny’s attempts to teach her employer how to cook. Each of the tangling threads throughout the film’s story are given pat little resolutions at the end of the film; racism is seemingly cured, the evil antagonist gets her comeuppance, everyone holds their head up high and moves on to bigger and better things. It isn't perhaps that simple, but this is a film that is intent on letting an audience walk out of the film with a smile on their lips, even if the cost of that smile is eliding the assassinations and brutality and repression that was still to come in the post-1963 South.

I have mixed feelings about Forrest Gump, another Southern-focused film based on a novel, but I at least give it credit for acknowledging that history is a messy affair. Your friends die, wars cripple you, hope is delayed or extinguished. The Help seems to go too far in the other direction; it’s a PG-13 version of the awful history of racism, glossing over the rough spots and focusing on outcomes that are too easy to be given credence. And it has to be said that its central storyline, featuring a plucky young white woman who sweeps into town and helps topple decades of ingrained ignorance with an anonymously-published book, veers awfully close to the border between “sketchy” and “insulting.” Yes, there were many white people who helped in the battle against Southern racism, a few even sacrificing their lives to do so, but instead of telling their story, or at least a story that actually happened, The Help relies on a fiction, and it’s a fiction that itself relies on the patronizing “white people are the cure to solving racism” theme that has appeared in various guises in films like Avatar and Dances With Wolves.

With that caveat (and it’s a major one), The Help can be celebrated as a film with a lot of strong female roles that doesn’t define its characters based on their relationship to men; it easily passes the Bechdel Test, in other words. Skeeter plainly states her preference for a career over marriage, and despite the fact that she’s set up with a prospective boyfriend by Hilly, Stone and director Tate Taylor treat her relationship as a believable adjunct to her character’s development rather than as a revelatory, life-altering event. (The film still would’ve been better--and shorter--without this subplot, though.) The friendships between the characters feel real, even if there is an awful lot of “let’s look each other in the eye and cry and hold our hands and shake them together while not saying a word” kind of shots around the film’s climax.

There’s a curious kind of power to The Help, but one that’s a bit restrained by generous helpings of schmaltz and an ending that feels almost insultingly pat, as if a book published in 1963 had simply cured racism. It’s a film that celebrates the bonds between women, and there’s a force behind that portrayal that’s affecting, if only due to the rarity with which such films appear. (That's not to discount the wonderful ensemble performance, though.) It is also, alas, a film that settles for being crowd-pleasing instead of feeling entirely honest. This is the kind of film that’ll be shown in future high school civics classes when the teacher has a headache and just wants to relax for a period, which is fine; just don’t mistake its contents as having come from a textbook.