Review

Review Date: 14-August-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Help (2011)

Midway during The Help the flow of the story — about subjugated black housemaids in 1960s Mississippi and a white woman who documents their plight — screeches to a halt. The focus briefly shifts to the love life of the white woman, a recent college graduate quaintly nicknamed "Skeeter" (Emma Stone) who has never had a beau. The point of this digression is immediately obvious, thereby negating the later "payoff," and the scene feels like an intrusion into the narrative. It's a good example of the problem that plagues the movie.

As with many adaptations of books I haven't read, The Help left me wondering whether the novelist (Kathryn Stockett) achieved a degree of subtlety which the filmmakers couldn't translate. Despite being blessed with a great group of female actors, screenwriter/director Tate Taylor does not balance the general with the specific, the societal with the personal. This is unfortunate because the topics addressed in The Help deserve consideration. Not too long ago black women in the South constituted a class without a voice; and yet, ironically, the whites who looked down on them handed them the most important of social responsibilities: the rearing of their children. The freakiness of this arrangement becomes clear through the experiences of Skeeter's first subject, Aibileen (the wonderfully grounded Viola Davis). She shares love with the white girls she raises but must watch them grow up to be as brittle and prejudiced as their biological mothers. As Aibileen recognizes, her white employers' hatred is directed inward as well as outward (bridge-playing and looking pretty can't fulfill even a belle). This broad view of the culture persists into stories of other maids who recount their lives to Skeeter. After getting fired from one job for defiling the guest bathroom with her supposedly inbred pestilence, the sassy Minny (Octavia Spencer) goes to work for a white woman (a winning Jessica Chastain) who also suffers from the town's social hierarchy. Skeeter herself, along with several of her subjects, can recall tender instances of black-white relations along with bitter ones.

Representing a complex part of American culture that may have evolved but has never fully been reckoned with, The Help is both compelling and heart-wrenching. But on an individual level, extraneous characters and sidebars repeatedly add the taint of falseness. The town's leading lady, a titanic bitch convincingly played by Bryce Dallas Howard, has a mother (Sissy Spacek) who pops in now and then to add home-fried Southern eccentricity. Mention is made of Minny's abusive husband, which feels like a topic for another movie much like Skeeter's boyfriend. Worst of all, excepting Aibileen's muted moment of defiance, the scenes of revenge and empowerment lack conviction and thus diminish the issues at hand. It's particularly jarring to see Skeeter's mother (Allison Janney) change tack whenever Skeeter's story arc dictates and deliver a silly speech for the grandstand at the end. Studios are naturally concerned about marketability, but if a film is going to tackle an uncomfortable topic it ought either to lay it out frankly, as Skeeter aims to do, or show more finesse in softening the truth.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.