Review: The Help (2011)

The Help

Rating

Director

Tate Taylor

Screenplay

Tate Taylor (Novel: Kathryn Stockett)

Length

2h 26m

Starring

Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Ahna O’Reilly, Allison Janney, Anna Camp, Eleanor Henry, Emma Henry, Chris Lowell, Cicely Tyson, Mike Vogel, Sissy Spacek, Brian Kerwin, Wes Chatham, Aunjanue Ellis

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Original Preview

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Review

Exploring a dark period of American history with a perseverant presence, The Help asks audiences to understand how difficult it was to be a Black woman in the south at a time when the Civil Rights movement was trying to take flight.

Set in the 1960s, Tate Taylor’s directorial breakthrough stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as a pair of maids working tirelessly for small wages in the households of white southerners. While these Black maids perform Herculean labors to raise white children, few of the children grow up to be much different from their parents. One exception to this trend is young Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) who has just returned to her hometown seeking the journalistic experience she needs to work for a prominent publishing house in New York City. While taking up the pen of a household advice columnist, she befriends Davis’ Aibileen Clark who agrees to help her write the article, but is ultimately asked to sacrifice more than she ever dreamed. Skeeter wants to write a book from the point of view of the help, telling their stories of frustration, joy, and indignation at the sometimes fair and sometimes abusive relationships they have with their employers.

This depiction of 1960s Mississippi is not entirely sanitized, but is given a rosy hue that belies the more egregious elements of life as a free Black worker in the Deep South during one of the worst periods for Black rights in American history after the Civil War itself. Still, you get enough of a sense about how desperate and frustrated these maids are just from the nasty and cruel ordeals they must go through to scrape together a few pennies to put a kid or two through college or to put a meager helping of food on the table. Spencer and Davis deliver wonderful, career-defining performances in the piece, each portraying an aspect to the many facets Black women had to put forth. Davis encompasses the selfless perseverance while Spencer digs deep into the righteous indignation and bitter recrimination that comes with standing your ground against those who would rather turn their backs while the KKK and others beat them down than lift a finger to help.

While Davis is clearly the more dominant voice in the film, Spencer’s is more anchoring. Davis’ performance is dignified and resilient, much like her character. Spencer is given the semi-humorous storyline, but ultimately stands on the same ground as Davis while performing these sequences with fierceness and a touch of glee. Stone’s character is underdeveloped and she plays it the best she can, but it’s just the kind of personality that’s pulled from a modern sensibility and thrown into a period where it is far more bold than feels realistic. Stone has amazing talent and it peaks through, but it’s just an underwritten role dragging her performance down regardless.

Many films have focused on the harshness of these situations while showing the audience just how dangerous discrimination and mistreatment can be. Taylor’s film focuses on the lighter aspects, giving women whose lives were difficult and a constant battle for survival a type of revenge flick against those who would put them down.

The Help debuted in 2011 and while this review contains some of the observations I made 12 years ago, I was dispirited to note how my view of race relations in the United States had improved then, but have since deteriorated even further than imaginable and the type of battles being fought in the 1960s are being fought once again. The groups fighting against equal rights may have changed in name, but they are just the children of those same bigots, but more vociferous than ever before. We need to make bigots afraid again.

A film like The Help can show those willing to change the error of their ways, but those who don’t wish to grow will never do so. As a piece of entertainment, it works. As a historical document, its contents are too sanitized in an effort to avoid inflaming old tensions and that mutes its impact.