The Help
Directed by Tate Taylor
Starring: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain
Rated PG-13 for
thematic material
2 hrs. 17mins.
When you think of previous films about the tense history between Southern whites and blacks, you usually think of Oscar-winning classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night and Driving Miss Daisy.
The Help adds one more story to this history — quiet, more genteel, but no less tense. It’s about black women working as maids for white women in 1960s’ Mississippi. The racism they dealt with was the abusive subtlety of white female socialites who used their social status to express their bigotry.
Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent graduate of Ole Miss, has just returned to her hometown of Jackson, Miss. She is an ambitious, single white woman in a town where married white women rule the social scene, and Skeeter’s best friend, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), sits on top as their queen.
Skeeter lands a job at Jackson’s local paper, writing a column about housekeeping. To help with research, she seeks advice from Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), who works as a maid for a prominent Jackson family.
As Skeeter becomes acquainted with Aibileen, she gets an idea for a book. What is it like for black maids to work for white women? She runs this past Elain Stein (Mary Steenburgen), an editor for a prominent publisher in New York.
With black civil rights now a prominent issue in the U.S., Stein says she’ll consider the idea if Skeeter can get enough black maids to share their stories.
Herein lies the problem. It can be dangerous in Jackson for a black woman to speak frankly about her white employer. Skeeter has to convince Aibileen and others like her to tell their stories. As they do, she uncovers tales that would create trouble for everyone in Jackson if they ever became public. Skeeter knows the consequences, yet keeps prodding and writing.
This film is overrun with clichés. It uses too broad a brush to paint white women in Jackson as racist prima donnas, white men as hands-off husbands and black women as servants. The result is a loss of complexity in the characters. Perhaps that’s just the nature of paring down a large book into a movie.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if, in real-world Jackson, the civil rights movement made the relationships between white families and black maids even more painful because of the close interaction between maids, family members and their children.
But there is much in this story that seems to inspire the women in this film to bring their A games. Credit goes to Stone, Howard, Davis, Chastain and Spencer for taking a film that tips toward Steel Magnolias and kicking it in the ol’ Southern derriere. Each time the plot starts to sag like a pair of pantyhose, these ladies hitch up the story and keep it interesting.
In particular, Davis plays ying to the yang of Minny (Octavia Spencer). Her endurance is the perfect balance to Minny’s sass. She bears up with quiet dignity while Minny has a tongue as sharp as a well-honed kitchen knife. In the end, their friendship helps them survive.
Chastain as Celia Foote, town tramp turned trophy wife, adds tenderness to the story as she implores Minny to teach her to cook. Here we can see that separation crosses all boundaries. Beyond black and white, hate can be generated by simply being different.
In atmosphere and approach, this film feels like dozens of other films chronicling Southern blacks and their struggle for freedom, but the ladies in charge make it worth pulling up to the table. There is some stereotyping, yes, but in the words of Minnie, she “don’t burn no chicken.” No doubt about it. When it comes to serving up Southern fried, these gals definitely know how to cook.
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