Review: 'The Help'

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The Oscars may be months away, but there are at least three powerhouse performances in The Help that are sure to get red-carpet honors. Both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as “colored” maids toiling in upper middle-class white homes in the Jim Crowe Mississippi of 1962, and Jessica Chastain as a flighty but loving newlywed, are stand-outs in a cast where all concerned soar. Cicely Tyson is superb, as always, in her brief scenes as the oldest of the “help”.

Tate Taylor adapted and directed Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel and insisted on filming it on location to add a convincing visual feel to the entire enterprise.

Davis’ Aibeleen narrates the story through flashbacks and tells the story of Skeeter (Emma Stone) who decides to write a book of interviews with the “the help” and get their side of life as paid (barely) domestics. Working in the household of Elizabeth and caring for her children as if they were her own, Aibeleen endures her lot in life with resignation but always grace. 

The film jumps to the households of other maids in Jackson as similar scenarios play out. These maids all have their own families, but it is the white children they care for that becomes the focus of their long working days. Hilly (the excellent Bryce Dallas Howard), when not hosting long, lazy alcohol-fueled Bridge afternoons at her home, is trying to push through a city initiative that will mandate separate bathrooms for the “colored” help.  

Emma Stone’s Skeeter, a recent journalism graduate of ‘Ole Miss is clearly cut from a different cloth. She secures a job taking over the “Miss Myrna” column at the local newspaper, dispensing cleaning tips and has no interest in aping the lifestyle of marriage and kids of her contemporaries. Approaching Viola about being interviewed for her book, then other maids, Skeeter seems to have found her calling in life, even if such an enterprise puts the maids’ careers and even their lives in very real danger in the still segregationist South.

Aibeleen is hesitant to tell her story, but after a Sunday church sermon dealing with courage, she begins to tell her tale to Skeeter over tea at her humble shack of a home.

Less enthusiastic, initially, is Minny Jackson, played by Octavia Spencer, who is employed by Hilly’s mom, portrayed to hilarious perfection by Sissy Spacek. Spencer is a force of nature: large, outspoken and unwilling to take anyone’s sass for long. She steals every scene she is in. 

After civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death, Minny, too, comes around to telling Skeeter her long, sad tale of servitude. If revenge is sweet, it is Minny who exacts it in the film’s most shockingly funny scene.

The film has already raised the same accusations of racial stereotyping that accompanied 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and its portrayal of a black chauffeur to a white upper-class Jew. We cannot ignore America’s ugly past by pretending it didn’t exist. The ladies of The Help are proof, once again, that heroes exist and that they can truly overcome evil.

The Help (PG-13)
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