The Help is a southern melodrama that pushes for racial equality. As the tale of oppressed African-Americans, they are given their voice by a lone white do-gooder. Its moral universe is rendered in bright cartoonish strokes.
The film’s journalist heroine is conveniently allowed to float free from the mores of culture (specifically 1960s Mississippi) she has lived in all her life. Viewed as an airbrushed fairy tale, however, it is rousingly effective.
1. Quick review
The Help is an interesting film about a volatile subject. It presents itself as the story of African-American maids in the South. The film shows the relationship between the maids and their employers during Jim Crow days.
The Help has two stories layered over each other. It is both the story of how they empowered a young white woman to write a bestseller about them, and how that book transformed the author’s mother.
2. Is it worth watching?
This is a good film, both involving and wonderfully acted. The characters in it are especially quite moving. It is your generic feel-good fable, but with an important message. It is undoubtedly a story that deals with pain but doesn’t care to be all that painful.
We don’t always go to the movies for searing truth, but more often for reassurance. Yes, racism is vile and cruel. But ultimately, we need everyone to come together to combat it in social structures, including white people.
That being said, the film itself is very entertaining. Viola Davis is a force of nature, and Octavia Spencer has a wonderfully expressive face and flawless comic timing. Praise, too, for Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Alison Janney. They would, however, have benefitted from a more fearless screenplay.
I. Plot
The story is based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller of the same name. It focuses on Skeeter Phelan (played by Emma Stone), a recent college graduate who finds that she doesn’t fit in so easily.
She is a journalist in the making and is on the lookout for her big break. The film, however, is stolen by two other characters: Aibileen Clark (played by Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (played by Octavia Spencer). Both of whom are maids.
Aibileen has spent her life as a nanny, raising little white girls. She is very good at it and genuinely gives them her love. Minny is a maid who is fired by a local social leader, then hired by a white-trash blonde.
Davis and Spencer have such luminous qualities that this becomes their stories, perhaps not entirely by design. Skeeter convinces Aibileen and then Minny to speak frankly with her in an attempt to share their stories.
As the book develops, so does her insight and anger. The systemic racism proves to be eye-opening to Skeeter, and the people around her who have allowed it.
II. Music and visuals
The Help has been musically directed by film score composer Thomas Newman. The film’s soundtrack comprises of twelve songs by various artists. This includes Sherry by The Four Seasons, Jackson by Johnny Cash, The Living Proof by Mary J. Blige, Victory Is Mine by Dorothy Norwood, and Don’t Think Twice by Bob Dylan.
The film is based on a bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Her book was published by Penguin in 2009 and led to booming sales. When it touched a nerve among the black community, Stockett issued an admission about how she could never understand what it felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi during the civil rights movement.
The film version of The Help, directed and written by the relatively inexperienced Tate Taylor, does full justice to that intention. Short on style and flashy technique, The Help on film compensates with genuine, visually emotional force.
3. Final thoughts
In the wake of the racial war today, the ridiculousness in this film cannot be ignored. The Help is an adaptation of a book written by a white woman in the 2000s about black women during the era of Jim Crow.
Among rampant racism, it has the exhausted trope of the white savior in it. In a film against racism, there are several white men with important speaking roles. Interestingly, only two black men are shown to have much to say.
The film proves to be sickeningly offensive in its portrayal of racism; it capitalizes on the civil rights movement and molds characters in racist stereotypes for the sake of a white journalist’s big break.
A white woman writes a book that gets her a job in New York so she can leave Mississippi and follow her dream. Good for her.
But what of the black women whose stories she told? The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker at best. However, the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient. It is a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.
4. Grade
Story: F
Cinematography/Animation: B
Acting: A
Music: B
Direction: C-
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