What’s the real evil in civil rights era Jackson, Mississippi? Is it racism or controlling, white female socialites? “The Help” thinks it’s the former but the film is simply an entertaining movie about the latter.
It tells of how the budding young journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns from college to find she is more enlightened and intelligent than her prejudiced housewife friends and that the black maid that helped raise her as a child is gone from their home. She’s embarrassed by a rule that would force black servants to use a separate bathroom outside the house and decides to write a book from the perspective of the help.
Skeeter’s two most animated subjects are the life of the film. Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minnie (Octavia Spencer) are fun, sassy, strong and complex individuals with a lot of stories about one of their employers, Hilly Holbrook. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Hilly with spunk and whiplash tartness, but her character is a one-dimensional, bitchy control freak who determines who’s in and who’s out in her middle class WASP social circle of women.
If Hilly has to use Jim Crow laws to get her way, so be it, but I’m not confident that’s racism. And “The Help” seems unsure of how to make change in Jackson, Mississippi, content instead with giving Hilly her comeuppance in a series of dopey gags involving toilets and pies that border on chick flick/rom-com territory.
However, the common critical thread about “The Help” is that it celebrates the goodness of white people while ignoring the black characters. That’s not entirely accurate when compared to a film like “The Blind Side,” one that renders its black character virtually mute and allows the white women to stand valiantly as they pull black people out of the gutter.
“The Help” is elevated above that by the multi-dimensional performances of Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. Spencer will be one of the more memorable supporting characters of the year given her large role in the film, but Davis is the real visionary here. Look at how Davis employs dialect to truly embody Aibileen and not just an actor performing. Notice how much poise she maintains under pressure and how much passion she delivers in every emotion.
This is one of the strongest performances of the year, and surely an early Oscar contender. The rest of the film is acted equally valiantly, and as the film gets going, it dumps the “exceptional blacks vs. awful white women” approach and gives all of its players more depth.
This is a performer’s film that many women will respond to most strongly. It has a lack of memorable male characters, but “The Help” remains aplenty of giddy joys.
3 stars