The Help Serves Well, but Inaccurately

The Help (2011)

Directed by Tate Taylor

PG-13, 146 mins.

* * *

The Help was a runaway best seller and the film version has been much anticipated. So how is it? It’s actually quite a lot like Kathryn Stockett’s book in that it’s a terrific story filled with memorable characters. It’s also like the novel, Ms. Stockett’s first, in that it is uneven, prone to tying together loose ends a bit too neatly, and of dubious historical authenticity. Stockett, who co-wrote the script with director Tate Taylor, might have done benefitted from working with a director whose resume wasn’t almost as slight as her own, but give both credit: the film has a big heart, even when it pulls too hard on the strings.

For those unfamiliar with the content, the setting is Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, a time in which Jim Crow was Lord and Master of the Deep South and every white family who could afford it (and lots who couldn’t) employed black servants to cook, clean, garden, and raise their kids. Those servants were, simply, “the help,” and most whites gave no more regard for their lives, dreams, and frustrations than one might to the grocery clerk at the local Piggly Wiggly. Nor did they hesitate to refer to them within earshot as “niggers” and speak of the diseases they supposedly harbored. Enter Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, an optimistic white college grad whose education and strong bond with her family’s former maid have led her to question the vacuous world of peers whose lives revolve around Junior League, pursuing husbands, manicuring lawns, lacquering their hair, and keeping black folks in their “proper” place. Skeeter’s also an aspirant journalist with the big idea that just might open the door to the New York publishing world: an exposé on how black women feel about being “the help.”

The movie is filled with memorable female characters. There’s already early buzz about Oscar nominations for the two lead black actresses, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. Davis is terrific as Aibileen Clark, a dignified woman filled with deep sorrow over her son’s death and simmering rage over racism. Just two things keep her going: her love of the children she tends, and the largely unrealized hope that they won’t grow up to be like their biological parents. Spencer is a ball of comedic delight but barely contained anger as Minny Jackson, though her portrayal is also solidly within classical “Mammy” roles, a script weakness and an anachronism that may scare off Oscar voters. The white roles are also strong. Emma Stone is Skeeter and she strikes the right balance between seriousness, insecurity, outrage, and fear. (She knows that if anyone discovers what she’s doing in advance, she’s in deep trouble and the lives of her informants are in jeopardy.) Most viewers probably won’t notice Stone as much as the two characters whose roles are as outsized as Spencer’s: Bryce Dallas Howard as the despicable Hilly Holbrook and Jesscia Chastain as the ditzy Celia Foote. Hilly is the easiest character to hate since Cruella Deville--a shallow, smug, bullying, self-serving little witch oblivious that she’s trashier than Celia, whom she delights in belittling. Chastain is affecting as Foote, though sometimes it looks as if she watched too many Marilyn Monroe movies preparing for the part. Toss in superb performances from the other maids and a few meaty cameos and bit parts--Allison Janney as Skeeter’s mother, Cicely Tyson as the Phelan’s departed maid, and Sissy Spacek as Missus Walters--and you have a strong female cast, a rarity in film these days. (Spacek clearly had a blast chewing scenery like it was one of Minny’s chocolate pies!)

The weaknesses? Readers of the novel will find Emma Stone a poor match for their mental images of gawky and awkward Skeeter. Stone does her best to hide behind gawdawful glasses, but she’s way too pretty for the part. Readers will also miss the details of Jackson’s self-ridiculing white social world. Ditto the deep backgrounds of maids other than Aibilene and Minny; even at 146 minutes the film had to excise most of these. And don’t look for any strong or memorable male characters; they are as AWOL and ill defined as women characters in typical Hollywood fare.

There are three glaring issues inherent in the film because they were inherited from the novel. The elephant in the room is that this is a story about race told from a white perspective. All doors and windows are wide open to the charge that this is revisionism gone wild. Is this civil rights as they actually unfolded, or is Skeeter little more than a projection of what whites wish they had done, but didn’t? Is Hilly’s downfall real hubris, or a curtain that obscures another decade of deadly racism? (Check out Bruce Watson’s superb book Freedom Summer and get back to me about how much changed in Mississippi by the end of 1963.)

This leads to two other issues. The 1960s and civil rights are present in the film, but mainly as scenery and plot devices. The murder of Medgar Evers, for instance, serves to convince other maids to speak with Skeeter, but we don’t really learn much about Evers or the larger context of the civil rights movement. To put a point on it, without the movement, no maid would speak with Skeeter. And then there’s the issue of the “and they all lived happily thereafter” ending. Okay, the film doesn’t really end that way, but it does wrap up on a self-actualizing note that implies that the pluck and grit of all the likable characters ensures that they’ll land on their feet somehow. Un huh. It’s 1963. Looming on the horizon are urban riots, the murder of Dr. King, black power, the Black Panthers, and lynchings conducted with the same cavalier disregard as the firing of a maid.

Enjoy The Help. Savor its characters. Admire its heart. Just don’t confuse it with history.