The Help (2011)
Adapted from Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel, Tate Taylor’s film feels in every way like 90s Oscar bait. The book’s whitewashed vision of racism in 60s Mississippi has been carried over to the big screen, but so have its undeniably big-hearted (if naive) message of acceptance and strong characters that we care about. Emma Stone plays Skeeter, a recent university graduate determined to write a book of interviews from the point of view of the help. Her first interviewee is Aibileen (Viola Davis), who has raised seventeen white children, all the while having to bear the loss of her only son in a workplace accident several years ago. Aibileen is quickly joined by Minnie (Octavia Spencer), her sass-mouthing friend whose wicked sense of humour sees her fired by the town’s local bigot, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), and hired by white trash with a heart of gold, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain). Taylor is adept at singling out the novel’s key pleasures, namely the humorously grudging friendship Minnie feels for Celia, and Hilly’s inevitable comeuppance.
The film celebrates female friendship and privileges an against-the-odds narrative and kneejerk sentimentality over a more rigid examination of prejudice in 60s Mississippi. It works best when embracing the former, and is helped enormously by its talented cast. Viola Davis proves once more, just as she did in Doubt, how much she can bring to even the smallest of scenes, her portrayal of Aibileen the one area of true conflict and difficulty within the entire film. Elsewhere, Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard create amusing, humane characters from a script that leans towards caricature on more than one occasion. Finally, if Taylor’s adaptation carries over many of the novel’s problems of representation and its chocolate box approach to hot-button topics, it also understands the novel’s key pleasures in sketching broad but affecting relationships between its characters, and its “laughter through the tears” approach works better than you expect. A success mitigated by its refusal to get its hands dirty, but a success all the same.
