The Help: Where Is the Love?

Midway through The Help, this summer's box office giant adapted from Kathryn Stockett's wildly popular novel, the major turning point occurs during a church service.

The preacher's sermon on Exodus 4:10—Moses' reluctance to obey God because he is "slow of speech and slow of tongue"—convinces African-American housemaid Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) to respond to the persistent and potentially dangerous requests of Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) to share her stories of what it's like to be a black maid raising the children of white families.

When Phelan, an aspiring novelist from a well-to-do white family in Jackson, asks Clark what changed her mind, she responds, "God...and Miss Hilly Holbrook." But while the preacher's message focused on having the courage to love even our enemies, viewers get the sense that Clark's motivation to speak out comes less from God and more from the desire to exact revenge on the antagonist Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) and others like her.

Holbrook, the caricatured housewife who represents everything bad about the Jim Crow South, has fired Clark's friend Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) and slandered her name, setting into motion Minny's decidedly unloving reaction that leavens the movie's latter half with perhaps one too many references to a comic incident involving a chocolate pie.

While humor keeps darker elements like domestic abuse, a violent arrest, and Medgar Evers' death from overshadowing the plot, as I watched I kept thinking, "These women are certainly risking danger...but where is the love?"

Jesus famously said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" This challenge having been invoked at the turning point of The Help, none of the characters ever put it into action.

In the end, Clark asserts that trying to love one's enemies is hard and it begins only by telling the truth. Fair enough. 

But based on the entrenched prejudices of every character that remain intact throughout the movie, it's hard to believe that the beginnings of transformative love have even begun to stir, even as the credits are rolling.

This makes a celebratory reprise of the church service scene seem puzzling. It remains unclear what the publishing of Phelan's book has done to advance the cause of love.

I found it rather disappointing that a story set in the thick of the civil rights movement would fail to depict in any meaningful way the enemy-love that characterized the best aspects of that part of our nation's history.

Frustratingly, this story has great potential to explore the complexity of race relations in the American South, but manages to boil down just about every gray area to black and white.

Clearly this is not intended to be a complex story.

Perhaps if I had been expecting something akin to Steel Magnolias instead of Mississippi Burning, I would've been less disappointed.  Because The Help is, as Roger Ebert aptly puts it, "a safe film about a volatile subject."

Be that as it may, I was moved several times by scenes depicting genuine love between blacks and whites across the intricate lines of institutionalized racism. When a roomful of maids come forward to support Phelan's project, their stories are nuanced and believable, as is the relationship between Phelan and her family's longtime maid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson). And if your eyes don't well up when you hear Clark's consistently repeated affirmations to the white children under her care, you probably don't have a pulse.

Ultimately, it's solid acting and the accurate recreation of 1960s Mississippi social norms that trump the movie's lack of bite. See it, enjoy the entertainment, and look for challenging subject matter elsewhere.